


keep your heart around (you might need it someday)

by llassah, tipitina



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Gen, Kid Loki, Team, de-aged loki, everything's better with rubber ducks, magic related handwaving, science related handwaving, superhero co-parenting, toddler loki
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-22
Updated: 2012-08-22
Packaged: 2017-11-12 16:09:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 34,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/493135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/llassah/pseuds/llassah, https://archiveofourown.org/users/tipitina/pseuds/tipitina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony Stark finds himself as a de-aged Loki Odinsson's temporarily designated parental figure, through no fault of his own. Responsible superhero co-parenting doesn't just involve feeding, housing and clothing a tiny Asgardian, it involves rubber ducks, transdimensional vortexes at bathtime, fruit parties, pictures of robots that draw other robots and hoverboards (eventually), as the team keep Loki safe while they look for a solution.</p>
            </blockquote>





	keep your heart around (you might need it someday)

**Author's Note:**

> I am indebted to tipitina, whose idea this originally was, and whose wonderful art and encouragement throughout have made this fic an absolute joy to write. I am also indebted to the mods of the Avengers Reverse Big Bang, who set this whole thing off. I've had a blast. This story would be a heck of a lot worse without the betaing skills of bananahater336, whose insightful and kind comments have helped me immensely. Thank you, all of you.

Loki came back to earth about six months after his whole Chitauri army of doom, billions of dollars of property damage, you were made to kneel, blah blah blah thing. The date wasn’t more precise than that, because, as far as SHIELD could tell, he’d just…slid into Midgard, without any real fireworks or anything, and when Tony first found him, it was more due to chance than any explosions, lightning, insane laughter, evil flying fish and motorcycle-riding aliens or art gallery eye thefts.

Tony found him because of a Las Vegas Trade and Commerce Expo, because a semi genius had decided after a bad breakup that the best way to get the fuck over it was to use his army of robots to destroy Vegas rather than eat ice cream and drink himself into unconsciousness like any functional person. It was kind of complete chance that Tony was there, dong some glitzy PR bullshit for the company because Pepper had asked and promised to do that thing he liked with her tongue if he said yes, and, well. Tony wasn’t stupid.

So when the shit started to hit the fan, it was the work of five minutes to get suited up and fly from the party, away from the casino and the hotel with the fountain with the water jets based on the Fibonacci sequence, whose designer/engineer he’d already poached, to a scummier part of town, with drunks on the streets and the smell of piss in the air, and fifty flying weaponized bots.

The Vegas police force was there evacuating, doing their best with the drunks and the gamblers under intermittent fire, and he patched the suit’s systems into their communication channel. “Iron Man here. Where do you need me?” because there was nothing quite as stupid as going in shooting when there was another force there with their own tactics in place. (Steve had made them sit down and have honest to god strategy lectures. With slides.) The sergeant on the radios was a cool sonofabitch, because the response was: “Fewer robots would be real good, Iron Man.” Tony laughed.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said, and with that, he started weaving around the bots, seeing what made them tick.

Five minutes in, he was still on ‘who the fuck knows’ in terms of ticking, because the bots were completely fucking unpredictable, faulty programming making it hard to guess what they’d do next. There were too many unknowns, a kind of strength to a system so full of weakness after weakness. By the time he’d gotten a lock on the mainframe and the location of the control computer, he was very pissed off and very tired, so once he’d blasted his way into the lab by way of the window, he was in no way going to hold back.

He spent a very satisfying half hour explaining (swearily, in between shutting down the bots one by fucking one) why the robots were an affront to circuit boards, and maybe his girlfriend preferred people who didn’t call their workshop their ‘lair’ or send Doctor Doom fan mail or moderate the Facebook page for Doc Ock, and seriously, don’t call the people who got the police involved ‘traitorous minions’, they’re _friends_ , and it may well be that they’re what stopped him from getting turned into _glue_ by his shitty fucking robots by phoning the damn police force when they found out what was happening. Now, come quietly, and if there’s any more monologuing, there will be kneecapping.

As a thank-you to the Vegas Police force for not freaking the fuck out, which would have made his job a shit of a lot harder, Tony spent the rest of the night neutralising the bots, cataloguing them and uploading the schematics to two secure servers: the police force’s and SHIELD’s. He put himself through on speaker with the Avengers Tower, which meant he was moaning at Bruce about the circuitry and telling Steve that Vegas would make him cry (which got him another few 'sex wasn't invented in the sixties' comments, but no stories about the showgirls he'd toured with, which was a damn shame because he _liked_ those stories) and hearing how their days had been, mundane stuff. It was nice; it kept him from going too crazy as he worked through the night, with people dropping in and out of the conversation.

By the time he finished disassembling the last bot, it was five in the morning. Gray light crept into the deserted office they had given him to work in. He was beyond tired; it felt like his brain was full of grit, but he was too wound up, too angry to sleep. Sometimes, on bad days, every messed up kid with a brain that could program and hands that could solder, every dazzling showman who sold and sold, who promised more than he could deliver but believed every word he said, stared back at him from the mirror. Worse days, it was his father.

He ended the call, packed up his toolkit, secured the office and trudged out to the parking lot then suited up. “Get me the fuck outta dodge,” he said, and smiled as the suit did the rest. He was off in a happy daydream about making a robotic kitten, flying over sand with the occasional cactus, when Jarvis piped up. “Sir, there are anomalous energy readings two miles east of here.”

Tony blinked, forced his brain back into real life where there apparently weren’t AI robot kittens (yet), and flew to what was apparently a gas station in the middle of nowhere, and the HUD had the figure slumped against one of the walls with three bottles of whiskey next to him identified as ‘Loki Odinnson/Laufeyson; Asgardian; Hostile’, and Tony had the S.O.S. activated before he touched down, all footage relayed to his private server. He took off his helmet, which was stupid, he knew, but he could use the fresh air, and went into the gas station, praying there was a coffee machine there. It was six in the morning, the attendant looked as tired as he felt, but she summoned a smile for him as she leaned back against the wall.

“Could I get a coffee to go, please? Like, I don’t care how it tastes, I just want something with a shitload of caffeine,” and yeah, he sounded like a desperate addict, but that was only because he was, and once he got round to it, he was making a coffee machine as part of his suit.

“We’ve got a filter coffee that’s been brewing since the dawn of time,” she said, standing up and ducking into the back room. “The truckers go for coffee that wakes the dead. That your friend out there?”

“You could say that. Look, is there anywhere you can go? Things could get a little messy here, and I’d like it better if there weren’t any civilians here.”

“I’d prefer to stay,” she said, handing him a chipped mug of coffee. “But I live pretty close. Is there anyone you want me to call?”

“Nah, it’s good. Fuck, god, I think I just caused internal damage. What the _hell_ is in that coffee maker, and can I reverse engineer it?”

She laughed, put her hands on her hips. “Leave me the gas station in one piece, and I’ll give you half a day with the coffee maker. My boss calls her Greta Garbo; I’ve never worked out why.”

He left her locking up, walked around to Loki, still slumped. He had a cloak draped over him; Tony didn’t want to think about whether he was dressed, because of the possibility that he wasn’t. “I thought you were grounded,” he called from a safe distance. Loki stirred, opened his eyes.

“It is of no concern to you,” he said, eyes narrowed against the sun. Then, looking at Tony and apparently dismissing him, he took a swig out of his bottle of whisky.

“How, exactly, do you expect this to go?” he asked, then sat down next to him, because his heart was safe and his suit was strong and he was too tired to be afraid. He sipped his coffee then drained it, shuddering at its burnt flavor, the sour sharpness of the caffeine and the cigarette smoke taste at the back of his throat.

“Would you believe me if I said I had no idea?” Loki asked, and offered Tony the bottle. Tony accepted it, took a swig. It was fucking awful whisky, but he’d just finished his fucking awful coffee.

“Oddly, yes. But you’re a plans within plans, rarely completely defeated kinda guy. And expectations aren’t plans.”

Loki snickered, spread his hands and blew on them, filling the arid air with bright blue butterflies, then red and gold butterflies which disintegrated into water when he clapped his hands. It was child’s magic, simple and beautiful, and Tony couldn’t help smiling as he shook his head, passed Loki the whisky. “I figure you have three hours before the goon squad tracks you down. Up to you what you do in that time.”

He grinned, sharp and sudden. “Not taking me back to base yourself?”

No fucking chance. Tony bared his teeth. “No, but I might hitch a ride back with you in our nice secure quinjet. Always fun watching Fury light up like Christmas.”

They ended up sat in the full sun, getting gradually drunk. In Tony’s defence, it had been a fuck of a week, but by the time the SHIELD convoy rumbled up with full air support, he was glad the suit had balance sensors and movement calibrators, because there was no way he was standing up unaided. They watched them approach together, Loki’s expression completely tranquil. There was only half a bottle of whisky remaining out of the original three, and Loki handed it to Tony with a slight smile then submitted to the handcuffs, was about to be caged when he there was a soft whisper of air and a clatter as the chains fell to the ground, and green and gold butterflies fluttered off. Tony didn’t quite know why, but he kept the half bottle of whisky, put it in his workroom once he was back at the Tower.

Of course, all hell broke loose, then the shouting died down (eventually. He had to fill in the 'have you been mind controlled in the past few hours?' form, which took _ages_ ) and the day to day grind of being in the Avengers Initiative and mandatory sensitivity training and conflict resolution and combat training and drills put Loki out of his mind. He and Clint started using the corporate bullshit sensitivity speak in their bickering (‘When you took the last of the pickles, it made me feel upset.’ ‘I feel that the pickles might not be the issue you are really upset about, but I am sorry that you were upset by my having that sandwich that used them up.’) which made Steve sigh and Thor laugh and laugh, because riddles and word games were things he apparently dug. Thor in sensitivity training, for the record, was _amazing_.

Eventually, after four months, one week and two days of looking, SHIELD found Loki sitting next to the world’s largest ketchup bottle in Bumfuck, Illinois, drinking from a bottle of cheap whisky and wearing a lumberjack shirt. When they asked him what he was doing there, he smiled serenely, and said ‘I believe some Midgardian cultures call it a gap year,’ then let the agents take him to the helicarrier without any sort of struggle.

From what SHIELD had been able to piece together of his movements, it seemed he had been drifting from motel to motel, visiting a fucking bizarre selection of the ‘world’s largest’ tourist attractions. SHIELD was confused; Tony thought it was part of Loki’s evil scheme to create larger versions of each attraction, sending the custodians of the originals into catatonic shock then a frenzy of rebuilding and rebaking (in the case of the world's largest pastry replica of the Taj Mahal) so that they would once more be worthy of their roadside dust gathering waste of time world record.

As Loki hadn’t actually done anything, and as Thor assured them all that justice had been meted out, yea verily, Loki was sort of…free, but watched. Tony wasn’t quite sure how he felt about this. Clint seemed to be taking it surprisingly well, for Clint, but he also slept with his eyes open, jumped off tall buildings and had taken over one of the smaller storage rooms at Avengers Tower and made a sort of nest in one of the corners _out of Phil Coulson’s shirts_ , so it was kind of to be assumed that Clint fucking Barton was an unusual guy.

Bruce spent about five hours mapping out Loki’s route, checking the coordinates for any pattern, then when there didn’t seem to be, just went back to his gamma radiation and sunspots work. Natasha nodded when she was told, not looking at all surprised, then continued her barre exercises. When they told Cap, his jaw tightened and he did that thing where he was thinking of possible outcomes, strategizing, processing in a way that meant that they’d probably be getting some different training drills and new protocols to follow.

Thor. Well, Thor visited him regularly. Loki was his brother, after all. He kept extending the hand of friendship, or whatever it was they were to each other, and Tony couldn’t quite work out whether he admired that or thought it was a dumb fucking thing to do. It was probably a bit of both, but every time Thor went, he’d return a little bit more hopeful, because ‘My brother only turned my apple pie into adders this time, and their bite is but a scratch, no match for me!’ was apparently the Asgardian equivalent of going to a bar together, getting hammered (ha), doing karaoke duets and declaring eternal love for each other, then getting arrested for stealing a stop sign in terms of brotherly bonding.

Coulson just looked thoughtful. Then, he always looked thoughtful.  That is, when he wasn’t looking neutral. Then, he put his hand on his chest, like he was checking his heart was still there, and Tony had to leave the room and punch something, because he’d _made Pepper cry_ , and that was just unforgivable.

Tony was eternally grateful that he got to see Fury’s reaction, which was sort of sweary, sort of bordering on a diplomatic incident with a Prince of Asgard as he was a little too baffled to be completely diplomatic about ‘your crazy ass motherfucking brother. Sonofabitch!’ which Thor didn’t particularly like, which led to some hasty backtracking, and Fury promising to write a letter of apology to Thor’s mom. It was basically amazing, as was Maria Hill’s poker face as Fury delivered an apology that, had he been ten years old, would have been mumbled while looking at the floor scuffing the ground with his foot.

Tony _liked_ Agent Hill. She was an elegant swearer and a lethal poker player; she was more surprised by the lack of carnage than by Loki’s presence, and there was the crux of the matter: he hadn’t actually done anything this time. It was decided (Thor loomed until they agreed) that SHIELD would not class Loki as an immediate threat, which was kind of following protocol 37 (the ‘go ahead, punk, make my day’ protocol) what with the whole diplomatic immunity still for some reason a prince of Asgard thing.

Things went on. Loki visited the matchstick violin, the rocking chair, the barrel, the sugar cube, the clay model of Elvis (fat Elvis; more American); Tony got Mark VIII and Mark IX (reflective technology, really fucking cool) suits made, took Clint to a deserted aircraft hangar to test a pair of rollerblades with rocket boosters on them (no regrets) and tried to get used to sharing his tower, to having people around him who weren’t Rhodey and Pepper, who didn’t have a background in Tony Stark wrangling. He tried to…well, he started making them stuff; weapons upgrades, lab equipment, the arrows on Clint’s alarmingly thought through wish list, a series of circuit boards of graded difficulty for Steve to get his head round.

It was basically wooing, because they’d been thrown together, fought together, drifted around then coalesced, and Tony had no idea why or how to make it stick, and it scared him how much he wanted it to. Pepper let him talk himself out about this, then said ‘oh, Tony,’ and smiled at him in a way he didn’t completely understand, but she was stroking his hair so it was okay. Pepper and Rhodey were his designated Avengers-initiative-related freakout sounding boards. He'd made them little embossed business cards with their job description written on them. It was only polite.

They got settled into living together, mostly. Every Thursday, they had a mini party, because the concept of a birthday being once a year only applied to puny earthlings, apparently, and Thor loved party hats. Like, really loved party hats, and it took a heart of steel not to be moved by his look of joy when party hats were on his head (sometimes in the plural). They’d drift together on other days, too, after training or for debriefings, but Tony had designed the layout so that everyone could have their privacy if they wanted it, and each of them had good days and bad days, but they didn’t hide away too much.

Soon, Loki watching wasn’t their whole focus. There were other…well, superheroes, out there. Tony thought the majority of them were fucking douchebags, but they had the whole ‘rah rah team’ thing down (unless they were being mind controlled and set against each other, which happened a lot, who knew?). They sometimes asked for support from other teams, which meant Tony got to test out his suit, which was fun, and follow orders from people who weren’t Cap or Phil, which was not quite so fun. He got tired, injured, his suits got dented, torn, and things took on a rhythm of fight, repair, recovery. In between, he taught Steve soldering, and sometimes they’d work in the workshop, Pepper sitting on the couch with her feet curled up underneath her and it was perfect, completely perfect.

Then, Loki came to New York. There weren’t riots or mass panics, mainly because he’d taken to dressing like a hipster and cut his hair, but the alert started to sound in the Avengers Tower the minute the bus had crossed the Stateline, and got higher in pitch once Loki had finished looking at the world’s largest kaleidoscope and entered the city. Loki hadn’t killed a single person, hadn’t made a single ‘puny earthlings’ speech, he’d just…looked. They were still following protocol, but they made sure they kept tabs on him, which was how Tony ended up in Central Park, sat on a bench in the shade of a tree, as Thor and Loki ate hot dogs, which was about as odd as it sounded. “Truly, brother, they have collected a mighty number of rings of rubber, and they have affixed them together in a ball of vast size.”

“But…why?”

“I know not. Stark, explain,” Loki commanded imperiously. Tony shrugged. Middle America was kind of alien to him. Cap had gone off on a road trip because he wanted to see it, but he was quite happy where he was.

“Because they can, I guess. It’s kind of an…impulse. Like, why not do better?” and maybe human psychology 101 wasn’t the best plan, given Loki’s whole subjugation deal, but hey, Tony had a giant cardboard cup full of coffee, and Thor had just bought twenty hot dogs. Loki nodded thoughtfully.

“A challenge, then.”

“Yeah, kind of, but an invented one. I mean, grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter who has the world’s biggest rocking horse or whatever; it’s an artificial need. Like, uh, like Marx’s false needs, but not necessarily economic.”

“I have read this Marx,” Loki said, with a slight frown. Tony wanted, once again, to shake his nefarious plans out of him, because it seemed at the moment like he was just an anthropology student, all thoughtful in plaid, and at the end of the year, his year off, what the fuck was he going to do? What was he waiting for? The idea that he was without an evil scheme seemed laughable (evil schemes, nefarious plans…sometimes Tony wondered if he’d watched too many bad films) but it was a possibility.

“You get a library card, or something?” he asked. Loki smiled.

“Libraries are rather easy to enter by stealth, and I have exceptional night vision, Stark,” he told him, with a smirk. Tony rolled his eyes, because of course he’d break in to a place you could enter for free in the daytime and sit in the dark, reading. Why do it any other way?

Later, when he was working with Bruce to train the reverse engineered gas station coffee machine to make each of the team their coffee of choice, he realised he actually liked Loki, a bit. It was hard not to: even if he was a _complete bastard_ for fun, at least he had some kind of style, and if there was one thing Tony liked, it was style. It didn’t mean he’d hesitate if Loki proved a threat, he knows this for damn sure; Obie was someone he liked, even loved, for a long fucking time.

He tuned back in to what Cap was saying: “and the coffee had that burnt taste, because no one cleaned out the pot, and it had been brewing for days sometimes, and it stripped the roof of your mouth.”

“We’ll need reinforced mugs,” he said, to no one in particular. “Made of vibranium, of course,” which, thinking about it wasn’t such a bad idea, especially with Thor around. “But for getting that kind of effect…we could have a loop system for the coffee grounds, some sort of pressure chamber- a stronger heating element--”

“Like, a dual siphon coffee maker, with two chambers, and a special button, just for Steve?”

“With the American flag on it. And the coffee’ll taste like--”

“Freedom,” they all said, even Thor, and Steve smiled tolerantly as high fives were exchanged.

Tony didn’t know whether the sudden appearance of Viktor von Doom had anything to do with Loki. All he knew was the next few weeks got fucking busy: a number of museum artefacts were stolen, as were some things that SHIELD was investigating, Logan had worse PMS than usual and the Fantastic Four were looking more and more tired as they teamed up for evacuations and Doombot battles; the suit needed more than the patch-ups Tony did on the hop, and even Thor was getting grumpy about the whole thing.

They seemed to be operating with a mix of earth science and some form of alien energy (he’d have to start saying spells soon; it was sometimes the only way to conceptualise it). Steve was destroying punching bags when he wasn’t going over battle footage for tactical errors, Bruce was methodically going through energy readings when he wasn’t waking up naked in weird places (he needed to get those pants drop-off points worked out. Like, every three blocks, because one day Bruce was gonna get arrested, and there was already a tumblr called ‘naked hulk sitting in rubble’.) Clint, Natasha and Phil were…they were getting shit done, because, hey, professionals. Tony was pretty torn about the whole thing: there were parts he loved, then there were the bodies, and the people who had their homes destroyed, people who didn’t _ask_ for any of this, and if Tony heard anyone from SHIELD using the term collateral damage, he’d punch someone, because this had been going on for eight days, and no one knew when it would stop, and people were trapped, and scared, and angry.

On the ninth day, everything changed. Loki showed up in the middle of a battle, totally out of the blue, wearing his hipster clothes and carrying his magic box of tricks, and started…well, it looked like he was helping. Thor was happy as a clam, standing back to back with him as they fought the bots, overloading their circuits and hitting them at one another as Tony kept the fight contained, picking off targets, and the fight went surprisingly well, forcing a retreat with less property damage than usual, limited casualties and a hell of a lot of work for whoever or whatever repaired the Doombots.

Debriefing that night was fun. By this point Fury seemed to have given up on working out what the fuck was going on with Loki, and just watched the footage with them with a look on his face that was damn close to confusion. Tony had popcorn, and kept throwing it at Bruce’s head, until Clint started doing it to him, and fuck that guy knew pressure points.

They kind of concluded that Loki was possibly non hostile, that the Doombots kept getting better, so presumably they were learning bots, which fucking sucked. Natasha was the one who gave the full report, and concluded with, “Okay, logical strategic patterns probably aren’t going to work, right? They know those. We need something else, we need to exploit their weakness for unpredictability,” and if anyone knew manipulation, it was Natasha. “We need someone who’s crazy as a box of cats,” she said, and Tony sat back and watched everyone lose their shit.

She was right, though. Loki turned up the next day, was fitted with a communications device, to his badly hidden amusement, and told that he was in charge of strategy for the day. Steve took it surprisingly well; he was nothing if not pragmatic, and followed orders without complaint. They got the bots into a state of total confusion, Tony managed to convince half of them that the other half was their enemy, and Hulk just did whatever the fuck he liked, which made Loki grin like a little kid. By the end, there was considerable damage to the bots, von Doom was interestingly absent, and Richards was making some progress on tracking the bots to their source. It needed one more big push, and it would be okay.

They slept in shifts, just in case something came up in the night, and Loki had been invited back, because Coulson had an odd sense of humor and Steve was polite and grateful, and Tony liked watching people’s faces when Loki talked to them. It was kind of a sleepover in the penthouse deal; they ordered in food, did each other’s hair, and half the floor became mattress, which was _really fucking cool_. Natasha caught his eye as they went in, and he saluted her, then mouthed “popcorn?” at her, because this was going to be funny. She shook her head at him, went back to discussing the NYPD liaison who sat in on strategy meetings with Maria Hill (was it his real hair, had he been in a prog rock band or did he have a cooler twin, was he actually drinking coffee or whisky in a mug. The usual.)

Tony decided needling Clint was a sensible thing to do. Pepper said he was like her old, much loved cat who would keep walking repeatedly into an obstacle rather than around it, which was kind of accurate. But he didn't have furballs, and he didn't lick himself clean, no matter what _some people_ might put in the gossip columns. “Good spotting up there, hawk, anything I need to know about those arrows? Oh, and also? Good job not trying to kill Loki, kid,” which was, yeah, kind of a dick move, but it needed to be said. Clint flipped him the bird, came over to him.

“I will infiltrate the water system, take a piss in the pipes right above your bathroom, and send footage of you taking a shower in my piss to YouTube under a hundred different usernames,” he whispered,  gave him the creepiest fucking stare in the world, then snapped out of it. “Oh, and those arrows might work a little better if they aren’t so fixed to the shaft- it’s good now, but some of the doombots have been able to pull the whole thing out before the acid kicks in.”

“Right. Uh, good to know. Phil Son of Coul, has he always been this alarmingly specific with threats?” he asked, because that had been thought out.

“He’s got a lot of time to think of these things on missions. It’s the reason I keep him around,” Phil said, then smiled at him. “You look like shit, Stark. Those repairs holding up?”

“So far. I’ve been faking dents, distracting the bots from the real patches of damaged suit. Amazing what a little paint and nail varnish will do,” and God bless the merchandising industry for bringing out the ‘Avengers’ range. Worked on Steve’s shield, too, at a push; quick drying, chip proof, nail strengthening. “If you’re real good, I’ll let you paint your nails in Capsicle blue.”

There wasn’t a riot, when Loki joined them. He seemed tired, a little, but quiet. Clint went into a minor pizza coma; he ate so many trying to keep up with Thor that all he could do by the end was lie on his back and groan as Natasha rubbed his belly. Apparently, it was “bravely done, but you are but little, eye of hawk,” which was sort of a slam down, sort of not. Thor sometimes looked at the rest of them like they were really cute kids who had managed to color mostly in the lines, but it put this warmth into his voice that Tony kind of wanted to curl up into sometimes. Thor also gave great hugs.

They slept in shifts, in the sleeping bags Tony had got custom made. Phil’s had this collar and tie at the top that would never not be funny, and he had no fucking clue why, but he’d got one made for Loki, too, which made Loki look at him suddenly, holding the green and gold bag with this sudden wide open expression that quickly turned back to his usual smug neutral.

Tony had first watch with Natasha. She sat, her expression completely serene, as he sent communications back and forth with Reed Richards about von Doom and the bots. They were kind of all at the end of their collective ropes, now, and the involvement of some sort of magic-science hybrid was just…there was more than one person behind this shitstorm. Tony hated it when they cooperated. Lone villains were so much easier to deal with, and Amora was a name that made Thor’s face turn closed off and grim and Loki suck in a breath through his teeth.

“Tony. Go to bed, your watch is up.”

He shook himself out of his half formed ideas and plans and looked up at Steve. His hand was warm on Tony’s shoulder, and his smile was real, if a little rough around the edges. He knew better than to argue he wasn’t tired, because Cap was a brick wall where team welfare was concerned. He got into his sleeping bag, sliding in between Clint and Thor, trying to stop the whirling of his mind as his body ached with tiredness, but he knew he’d never drop off to—

He woke up to the sound of quiet conversation. “Any activity in the night?” Tony asked, then mentally replayed to see if it sounded as dirty the second time. It did.

“There was a spike in magic around four, but nothing further. I was unable to trace it,” Loki told him as he sat with a cup of coffee held close to his face. He was still wearing the same clothes as he had when he’d interrupted the battle and he looked hungover, pale and scowling.

“Is this something we need to worry about?”

“Probably. We’ll see,” he said with a shrug. It was kind of nice to know that Loki wasn’t a morning person. Also, it was funny to see the wince he gave when Thor used his outside voice.

“Greetings, SHIELD brothers! The sun is shining, I hear the lark, and it looks to be a glorious day. Truly, our names shall live on in song after our great deeds in battle!”

Tony laughed quietly into his coffee as Thor’s breakfast chaos took over the kitchen. A glorious day, if you happened to like battles. They suited up, had the usual pre-battle trash talking, and prepared to move at the first signs of activity.

When it kicked off, things looked fairly normal at first; there was a set pattern to the bots’ self-fixing capacity so they knew pretty much when they would come out to play, and each team was watching a different Borough for activity. They were fighting in Brooklyn when Jarvis first alerted him to unusual energy readings in one of the tower blocks. “Guys, one block north, two blocks east, there’s some sort of massed energy. Evacuation protocols on the whole block; Jarvis has sent the coordinates to NYPD.”

He dodged another bot, led it up into Clint’s range then dropped the moment he saw Clint’s finger twitch on the string. The arrow had a code scrambling device on it, and the bot started to turn on the other bots, shooting at them. He’d made ten of these arrows, but they needed to be used up quickly before the bots could adapt and develop better safeguards. He went looking for another fish to bait. “Sir, the energy levels continue to rise to a critical point.”

“Okay. Cap, can I borrow Loki? The energy source is growing. We need to investigate.”

“Pick me up, Stark,” Loki said as he spun and made a stabbing motion with his staff. Even in the middle of a fight he managed to sound faintly mocking.

“Okay Iron Man. Be careful. The block’s nearly evacuated, but there are still civilians.”

He saluted as he scooped Loki up. “You do realise it’s a trap, don’t you?” Loki murmured. His heart juddered a little. Was Loki—

“Oh, no, not by me. It’s far too much like hard work, a spell like this. I don’t quite know what it does, but whatever it is, it’s sure to be big. Are you scared, Man of Iron?”

“Of course. I’m not stupid. Jarvis, send all footage and readings to Director Fury. Live feed, starting now.”

He landed. There was a cordon, people rushing to safety far more efficiently than they would in any other city. New Yorkers knew when to get the fuck out, thanks to all the explosions and showdowns, the crossfire and hostages. He could feel the energy now, could feel it pressing against him as they walked into the apartment block. A ball of green light glowed above the reception desk in the lobby, light arcing across and around it. Loki looked at it, fingers twitching, then ran a hand through his hair. Even as they looked the ball expanded, drawing power from somewhere. “I can send some of this into the electrical grid. It might buy us time. Cover my back, Stark.”

He was having a job not getting the fuck out of there. The amount of power in that globe could completely fry him, suit or no, and it was taking everything he had not to run. Loki started muttering, flicking his fingers in strange patterns, tracing runes as sparks whipped out and singed his clothes, lashing his neck and hands until they bled. Spell after spell and still it grew. He knew now, with a certainty that chilled him, that all Loki was doing, could do, was to limit the damage it would inevitably wreak.

Loki stepped back with a hoarse cry as the ball of light expanded to fill the lobby, blindingly bright. The HUD had stopped showing anything; he hoped Jarvis was still connecting, but he knew his suit was just a hunk of metal encasing him now. It was hard to breathe, so hard. Loki was sprawled on the floor, fingers flickering as he kept trying, focus absolute, then the ball compressed to a pinhead and everything went slow. In Loki’s eyes was utter defeat, something Tony had never seen before, not really, because there were always other plans for him, an escape route or a bluff. He lowered his hands, slumped in surrender, and all hell broke loose.

Tony flung himself forward, only his body propelling the suit’s systems as he went to cover Loki, acting on instinct as he wrenched himself sideways to cover him. They were flung by the blast, strands of magic sinking into Loki’s skin, up the walls of the lobby, cold fire and sheer force, glass shattering, staff splintering into shards of light as the building was engulfed in green fire, then a roaring rushing crash, then—

Nothing.

He woke up in pain. Like, a fuckload of pain, too much to identify specific injuries. There was no response from any of the suit’s systems, and the dents were pressing into his joints, screen cracked because the suit had been weakened from repeated shots, from every battle where there was no time to repair. He used the manual disengage on the helmet and gasped in as much of a breath as he could. At least the dust had settled. “Fuck. Holy flaming fuckballs,” he said, then repeated it, because _fuck_. In the dark, he heard a quiet giggle. “Loki? That you? You hurt? What the _holy hell_ was that?”

A high, clear voice answered him. “I am Loki Odinsson, Prince of Asgard. I am uninjured, but I would be grateful if you could tell me your name and where we are.”

“Loki Odinsson, we’re on Midgard, under a building. Uh, my name’s Tony Stark. Loki, would you mind telling me how old you are?”

There was a pause. Tony could hear the hissing of a water pipe, creaking of steel joists and the soft falling of broken glass and debris. “I do not think I know,” he whispered.

“You’re young, though.”

“Yes.”

“Okay…what’s the last thing you—no, bad question—can you tell me your brother’s name?”

“His name is Thor. He is very loud, and never stays still,” and that disdain in his voice was just so…Loki that Tony grinned in the darkness.

“Can you tell me what games you like to play? I want you to keep talking so I know you’re okay.”

Loki kept up a pretty steady stream of chatter as Tony painstakingly triggered the manual release points on his arms and torso. He ran a mental checklist of his injuries as he went: left leg trapped, contusion to right temple, probable concussion. Left shoulder and ribs bruised, possibly cracked, hopefully not broken. Collarbone dislocated or broken. It hurt to breathe and hurt to move, but the feeling of freedom from the suit was amazing, and the blue light of the arc reactor even better.

Loki stopped talking, and for long moments they just looked at each other. Loki’s hair was dark, and it fell in curls around his face, which was rounder. His plaid shirt hadn’t shrunk at all, and he wore it like a cloak. He was _tiny_. Tony had no idea how old he was. Some part of Tony had thought it was a trick, that Loki was unaltered, that those green strands and Loki’s own magic had done nothing but make a building fall. Nothing but. Ha. But there he was, standing up straight and looking so young, and trying to look so brave, and Tony had never felt so old or so frightened as he did now.

“Loki, I’m going to get us out of here, everything's going to be fine, but I need your help. Do you see the arm near you? Press the button—no, not that one, that’s the tranquiliser dart, uh, sleep spell—yeah, that’s the button. That’s my tool kit in there. Now, we’re gonna play a game. It’s a good game, you’ll like it. It’s called ‘hunt the wire’, and it’s just like it sounds.”

He kept explaining as they worked, talking about what he was doing. Loki was confused by his clothing until Tony told him he used to be an adult, then he went still and quiet, and didn’t ask any questions about himself, which set off a few alarm bells in his head. Together they set about cannibalising the suit, looking for any circuitry that wasn’t completely fried. Loki was a steady pair of hands, and seemed to like passing him things as he worked. It was hard, working around his injuries; his work was clumsier than he’d have liked, but he managed to rig up a basic communications system that hooked into the arc reactor via his broken helmet, and once that had been resoldered—

“Jarvis, can you hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

He sat back and laughed, the movement making his ribs protest. Loki was wide eyed and solemn.

“Man, it’s good to hear your voice. Can you get a reading on where we are?”

“Currently, under a building, sir.”

“Bitchy, Jarvis. Man. Right, can you relay our status to the team? My leg’s trapped, possible broken ribs, shoulder injury, head injury, nothing life threatening. Loki is…uninjured, but he’s also sort of a toddler—no, that’s not an insult, sorry kid, it just means you’re younger than you were—with no memory of his adult life.  Jarvis, how’re things looking out there?”

“Doctor von Doom has gone with the Fantastic Four in custody, following the obliteration of his robotic forces. Amora the enchantress has fled to an unknown location. Sir, Loki has the same energy reading as when he was an adult. Energy, in this case, means power. Do you wish to inform them of his full status?”

“Yes. Okay. Okay. Right, tell the team we’re alive, and update them on our status.”

“I will keep them informed.”

He grinned at Loki, letting his head fall back and rest against the wall of their little cave in. “Everything’s gonna be fine,” he said, his heart lighter. Loki looked at him, both eyebrows raised.

“You said that before,” he pointed out.

“Yeah. Still true, though. Stick with me, kid, and we’ll be fine.”

Loki nodded, then walked over to sit next to him. Tony pulled him close, and smiled as he leaned in, relaxed against his uninjured side. He thought of the amount of power contained in such a small body, thought of a child’s mind and a child’s stubbornness, a temper tantrum that could flatten a city. “Your shield brothers. Do they know me?”

Tony closed his eyes briefly. “Yes. Your brother, Thor, he is grown, and he fights with us. You, before the building fell, you were helping, too. You were very brave— if you hadn’t helped, the spell would have been even more out of control. Do you want me to tell you about the rest of the team?”

“Yes.”

“Right, well there’s Steve Rogers, but you can call him Uncle Cap. He’s our leader, and he plays Frisbee like a boss- uh, Frisbee’s like a plate but not. You throw it. Hawkeye shoots arrows and can do juggling tricks if you ask him nicely, and I never know if he’s awake or asleep. Natasha is a warrior, a brave one, the bravest you’ll ever meet. She loves dancing, and tea. She’s like your Lady Sif- do you know her?”

“Yes. She likes to play rough games.”

“Right, well, she’s strong and brave, and Bruce Banner is a scientist, like me. You’d like him, he’s quiet, except when he turns into a noisy green giant. Phil Son of Coul helps us. He’s a part of a bigger group of warriors, but he is ours first. He’s our SHIELD brother, and he’s our secret weapon, because he looks quiet on the outside, but he isn’t. Director Nick Fury leads the bigger group. He’s very brave but he plays tricks, and Maria Hill’s his second in command, and she can sniff out a lie at fifty paces. Pepper’s my Pepper, she’s the best thing in the world, the whole world, and Rhodey, he's my oldest and best friend. Then there’s Thor. He’s very brave, and loud, and you’re basically his favorite thing in the world. You argue sometimes, but you’ve always been his brother. He’ll be so happy you’re safe, Loki.”

Loki shifted away and looked up at Tony, his eyes troubled. “But— I cannot fight. I will not be of use.”

Tony smiled slightly. “Neither will I, kid. I’m injured. But people aren’t measured by their use. Or they shouldn’t be. He’ll be overjoyed that you’re alive. Now, I think I need to keep talking, because I think I have a concussion so I can’t go to sleep even if I really want to, so I’m gonna tell you about science. Now, imagine it in glowing letters, cause it’s sort of like Midgardian magic, and it’s amazing. Now, what I do is engineering and physics and chemistry and computing all in one, real practical stuff. Bruce works in a lab, too, and he looks for patterns, and makes links between them. Now, I’m gonna start with the basic building blocks of science and work from there.”

He kept talking until his voice was hoarse, then stopped and listened to the dripping water, and Loki’s slow, sleeping breaths. Jarvis kept giving him updates, but he felt like time was running out, and the air was getting stale, and he was just going to ignore the fact his leg was fucking trapped, and he had no idea how much debris was above him because he couldn’t fucking _scan_ —

He took a breath. Another. The worst thing was, he couldn’t protect Loki, not adequately, and a rescue was going to involve a fuckload of falling concrete.

He shook him awake. “Loki, I need you to do something. You can sleep, but do you see my chestplate? Can you pull it over yourself please? Good.”

Loki drifted back to sleep. Tony knew it was hardly going to do much, but he had to try.

“Sir, I believe I can patch you in to the main comm.”

“Please,” Tony whispered, cleared his throat.

“Iron Man, report.”

He smiled. “It’s good to hear your voice, Son of Coul. Has Jarvis been keeping you updated?”

“Yes. Any change to your status?” Loki stirred next to him, and he felt a small hand grip the fabric of his shirt as he leaned in.

“I’ve stayed conscious. Air supply’s running a bit low, but it’s breathable. Blood loss is not critical, but I’m lightheaded. Loki’s fine, just a little smaller than we’re used to. Has Jarvis sent the scans to you?”

“Yes, and we’re working on clearing the debris. You might start hearing some noise in a few minutes.” He could feel himself slipping away again. “Tony. Tony, please respond. Tony!”

He drifted back into awareness when Loki climbed onto him. Mainly, it was the pain in his ribs, but partly the way he was flicking at his forehead. “Ow, Jesus. Okay, I’m awake. You tell him to do that, Son of Coul?”

“Yes. Tony, you stopped responding. You have to stay awake. Loki, do you want to speak with Thor?”

Loki gave a little bounce of excitement. Tony smiled at him, shifted so he was lying on the undamaged side of his chest. “Yes, please, Agent Phil Son of Coul,” he said. Phil gave a slight sigh.

“Patching him in.”

“Loki! Brother! I hear you have done great deeds this day!” Thor boomed. Loki looked at the speaker helmet in disbelief, and Tony snickered.

“Told you he’d grown,” he said, and got a fantastic ‘foolish Midgardian’ look for his troubles.

“Hello, Thor. Yes, Tony Stark tells me it is so, though I have no memory of them.”

“You are young yet, Loki. Mayhap when the spell is broken, you will. I am glad you are uninjured. Friend Hulk is lifting mighty rocks to get to you. Brother, I have a task for you.”

“Aye, Thor?”

“You are to keep Tony Stark awake. Son of Coul says you can flick him on the forehead every time he goes to sleep. Be of stout heart, brother.”

“Aye,” Loki said, nodded solemnly. Tony closed his eyes, feeling the breath sigh out of him as he drifted, deeper—

Flick.

He opened one eye and looked at Loki, who was watching him closely, as if to see what he’d do next.

“How much bribery would it take you to let me sleep?”

“No. You can’t sleep,” he said, and honest to god folded his arms.

“So…every time I do?”

He flicked Tony’s forehead. “Ow! I wasn’t even sleeping that time. Mean, Loki. Mean.”

“He has authorisation, Tony.”

“Steve, back me up here!”

“Tony, stay awake. Please.”

“Hawk? Nat? Hulk?”

“Hulk flick Tony on head too.”

“Get us out of here and I’ll give you a free shot, next time I’m in the suit,” he said, grinning as laughter rumbled through the speaker, through his bones. “Right, kid. Do you know ‘I spy’?”

He drifted in and out of consciousness, feeling his lucidity slipping away. Breathing was a strain, now, and hiding his injuries even more of one. Loki had gone from flicking his forehead to patting his cheek, gently, so he probably knew he was more hurt than he let on. They’d gone from I spy to ‘when Hulk went smashing’ to singing over the comms, Loki joining in on the chorus. They were halfway through ‘Build Me Up, Buttercup’ when he heard the first rumble and felt the air change a little. Dust dropped, and a girder crunched. “Loki, take cover.”

Loki looked at him, then at the chestplate. “You too,” he said, then, when Tony hesitated, he took a breath, air flickering green around him for a moment, and Tony really wasn’t equipped for toddler meltdowns, so he got the backplate, every movement a painful effort and they both hid, cocooned under the metal as Hulk picked through the building as delicately as he could.

“Guess who just got back today, them wild-eyed boys that had been away, haven't changed, haven't much to say but man, I still think them cats are crazy,” he sang softly. He could feel the breeze on his skin, fresh air a relief that almost made him sob, then the rubble shifted and twisted his leg, and he couldn’t help it, he yelled, ribs complete agony, spine arching as everything exploded into white.

“I’ve got a certain kind of headache, just below my temples, that I’ve named ‘Tony Stark’ in your honour.”

Tony blinked, then opened his eyes fully. White walls, and Fury's beautiful one-eyed face. Hospital or the afterlife, then. The pain meds he was on fuzzed his head up, but they gave Fury a pretty cool shimmer. He gave him a little finger wave, then tried to speak. It took two attempts, and Fury giving him a cup of water with a straw until he was able to get the words out. “Loki…is he safe?” Fury pointed to the side of the bed. There was a cot there, dark hair on the pillow. Someone had given him a teddy bear. “We’ll branch out into pharmaceuticals, get you some better pills then, oh director of my heart. And we’re keeping him. Or, uh, I am.” Fury sat down, propped his feet up on the side of Tony’s bed. “He’s just a kid.”

“I am so glad you didn’t say ‘harmless’ there, Stark—don’t you dare sit up— because that kid has as much magic as the adult version, and possibly worse impulse control, though that’s up for discussion. He’s frightened and confused, and God help us, he’s decided you’re the closest thing to a mommy he’s got.”

Tony decided to let the mommy thing slide; surely Steve was mommy. “We can keep him safe. We’re the highest powered babysitters in the world.”

Both Fury’s eyebrows went up. “We?” And yeah, he had a point.

“Or, uh, I’ll go to Malibu with him, get a tan, teach him to swim. I just—I—.” Fuck. He refused to beg, and the painkillers were messing with his self control. He stared at the ceiling until he could breathe properly.

“If I get a twitch, I’m holding you personally responsible, and I will keep you in a lab until you come up with an analgesic that works on my headache, and the only music I’ll let you play is Rebecca Black, and the only shirts I’ll let you wear will have Justin Hammer’s smiling face on them.”

Fury swept out at that, leaving Tony slightly turned on by how much thought had gone into that threat. “Don’t let Aunty Nick scare you,” he said cheerfully. Loki sat up, the picture of princely dignity, resplendent in his Thor pajamas. He had a pacifier in one hand, bear in the other.

“’m not scared,” he told him, head up high, which sort of cracked Tony up, sort of made him really fucking sad, because he was trying so damn hard to hide his fear.

“How long’ve you been awake, kid?”

“A while. Sleep is boring. I wish to know more Science.”

If Tony had had two working arms, he would have high fived himself. “Hop up, then,” he said, helping Loki up onto the bed with his good arm. He started talking, smoothing a hand through Loki's hair. He dimly remembered his mother doing the same to soothe him. “Now, the difference between a propeller and a jet engine is the way the air is used. In a jet engine, it’s compressed- squashed, like a fat guy in armor.” As he talked, he could feel Loki drifting off to sleep, burrowed into his side. “And when the spark ignites, well, we’ll look at that in my workshop. I mean, it’s tech from the fifties but it’s pretty cool. We’ll start at gliders and work up, because basic principles are the place to start, huh, kid?” No response. He was breathing slowly, pacifier in his mouth, bear resting on his chest. Tony stared up at the ceiling, trying not to think. It almost worked.

 

The next time he woke up, Pepper was there, holding a bag of clothes. “These are for Loki,” she said, and there was a slight wobble in her voice. He wanted to tell her it wasn’t as bad as it looked, but he wasn’t sure about that.

“Thanks, Pep,” he said instead. Loki had woken up and was looking at Pepper with open curiosity. “Loki, this is Pepper. Remember I told you about her?”

Loki nodded. “Best thing in the world,” he said, and he could literally see the moment Pepper absolutely melted. “Thank you for the garments.”

“You’re welcome, Loki. I hope you’re happy here.”

She met his eyes, her gaze clear and warm. “I was worried, Tony. But I enjoyed your singing, very much. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that, sober.” Tony just hand-waved that, then laced his fingers with hers, needing her as an anchor for a bit. She put her other hand on Loki’s shoulder, and they sat, quiet and contented until he drifted back to sleep.

He woke up with a start, two things foremost in his mind. First, Loki was gone. Second, Clint was staring at him, perched at the end of his bed, still and silent. He suppressed his yell, looked around wildly. “Where’s—”

“Bathroom break. Coulson’s with him now.”

“Clint, are you…okay with this? I—we can go to Malibu, I mean, I’m out of action, but this way you’ll have a base, and I know it’s kind of hard to deal with, and—”

“Stark. Tony. It’s fine. We’re both fine. He’s a good kid. We need to discuss things, logistics, but it won’t be a problem.”

“Even with Phil? I mean, we can go somewhere else.”

“That won’t be necessary, Mr Stark.”

Phil stood in the doorway, Loki’s hand in his. “Agent Son of Coul! Loki, I can’t believe you fell asleep as I was outlining the great science mysteries of Midgard. I may cry.”

Loki huffed slightly. “Silly,” he said, then looked up at Phil for confirmation. Phil nodded, then Clint did.

“We’ve been taking turns looking after Loki while you slept,” Phil said, presumably because of his increasingly baffled expression. Painkillers shot his poker face out of the fucking water.

“Sorry. My brain’s kinda…yeah. Eating, sleeping, tiny Asgardian. How long have I been out?”

“Two days, Stark. Apparently, having a fu—darn building fall on you’s the only way to get you to sleep.”

Loki approached the bed, and produced a piece of paper from a small table with crayons all over it, gave it to Tony and hopped on. Tony examined it closely, grinning as he saw immediately who the people on it were. There was him, a stick figure with messy brown hair and a beard, attached to a box by shakily drawn wires.  Then there were other stick figures: one with glasses (“So you met Bruce, then?”), one with a bow and a man with a tie - “Hawkeye and Son of Coul—I love Hawk’s costume, I’m making that for next mission. Purple’s good on him, and Pepper’s gonna have those shoes, too. And Aunty Nick- he looks grumpy, Loki. It suits him. And Uncle Capsicle! You got the shield patterns just right. Kid, is Thor…is he wearing a dress?”

Loki nodded solemnly, with just a hint of a smile in his eyes. “He likes dresses. Lady Sif would not wear hers, so he would exchange his garments for hers. He insisted.”

“She still won’t wear dresses,” Tony told him, ruffling his hair.

“My brother will have to, then,” he pronounced. Clint was grinning openly at this point.

“He would if you asked.” And he would, God help them. “Hey, when we get home, I want you to pick where I can hang this. I want to show everyone.”

Loki’s smile turned from mischievous to shy, and Tony didn’t know quite what to do with himself. He had never been more grateful for the sound of a familiar never inside voice. “Brother! I bring gifts!” Man, he loved Thor. He was his _favorite_ , especially when he saw what ‘gifts’ they were. Someone had taken him to Macy’s with a Starkcard, and there were ten stuffed bags of toys—not just teddy bears, but wolves, snakes, dragons, books, a paint box, a model castle—and Tony was on the point of proposing _marriage_ to him because there wasn’t a single toy weapon, nothing there that Loki wouldn’t enjoy on his own terms. Standing in the doorway, looking about ready to drop, was Steve, who had obviously been shepherding Thor around the store.

“Courage, mon brave,” Tony murmured, and by Cap’s smile, he assumed he’d heard. Loki jumped off the bed and led Thor to the corner where his drawing table was set up, and they began to take toys out of the bags, discussing them in low voices, oblivious to all that went on around them. Thor was nodding seriously as Loki pointed things out and asked questions.

“Aye, brother, the drawbridge was of great import to Midgardians, for the repelling of those who would enter their fortresses. Nay, no longer. At least, the country of the Britons may use them, for their ways are strange and they are of a villainous and archaic disposition.”

He caught Clint’s eye and grinned. Those movie marathons were paying off. “When are they letting me out?” he asked Phil. He was getting to the twitchy stage of recovery; he wanted off these pain meds, and no one had told him how bad his leg was, and by this point usually he’d have driven everyone out of the room and annoyed the nurses until they left him alone. What he wanted, sort of, was to freak out about how completely unequipped he was to take care of a tiny, potentially volatile god, who just happened to actually be sort of a frost giant, who fucking knew?

He knew, though, because he tried, where possible, to be as self aware as he could, that he didn’t talk about that sort of shit. He just…didn’t. He misdirected, found mechanical problems to solve, fronted until they went away and stopped asking, and he had no real idea how to not do that.

Phil came and sat by the bed, positioning his chair so that Tony could see him without straining his neck. “Three days, but you’re out of commission for at least a month. Tony, your leg isn’t broken, but it’s badly cut, and your ankle is sprained. You have cracked ribs, dislocated collarbone, rotator cuff damage and a concussion. Plus, you’re on babysitter duty for the foreseeable future.”

“Jarvis said Doom was out of action. What about the spell hybrid— Amora the enchantress?”

“She seemed to take a hit around the same time the building collapsed on you. Whatever her original plan was for that energy ball, it didn’t seem to happen. It depleted her energy until she was unable to deflect Thor’s hammer, and she used the last of her energy to escape. She’s gone into hiding somewhere, and SHIELD doesn’t really have enough experience in…the more mystical side of alien fighting to track her down. The footage you got to us before your suit went offline was useful, but we’ve got more questions than answers at this point about her.”

“And Loki? What happened to him?”

Phil smiled, wry. “I think the only person able to tell us that is currently playing with a stuffed toy wolf while his brother pretends to be attacked by a rubber snake. This is…really an Asgardian matter. Doctor Jane Foster is attempting to make contact with Asgard, where his father should have more knowledge of how to fix this. In the meantime, this is your responsibility. God help us, he seems to like you.”

“He likes all of you,” Tony pointed out. Steve walked over to them, pulled up a chair and sat with his arms draped over the back like the most wholesome Playboy centrefold in the universe, Clint jumped down from his perch on the windowsill and went to lean against Phil’s chair, and Natasha sauntered in, dropped a kiss on the top of Loki’s head, ruffled Thor’s hair and handed Tony a coffee cup. “Marry me,” he said, then looked around. “Is this an intervention? Meeting? Debriefing? Where’s Bruce? Where’s Pepper? I want science support and a Pepper, also, did you have a signal? Oh God, is there a signal I don’t know? Like, a secret one? Please let it be pheromones, please.”

They just looked at him, waiting him out, then Nat came and sat on the bed, cross legged. “Bruce should be here soon. We were waiting until you were a little more lucid before we talked.”

“I am always lucid. Always. Except when, uh, I’m sort of dying.”

“And on the full moon,” Clint muttered, and fist-bumped Natasha with a grin.

“Sorry I’m late, what’d I miss? Hey, Loki, hey wolf.”

Bruce ambled in, hands in pockets. “What was the signal?” Tony demanded, aware that he was looking a little bit manic, but still. Bruce thought for a while, then looked at him with the mildest expression possible.

“Pheromones,” he said, the side of his mouth twitching.

“You’re all fired. All of you. Not you, Thor, Loki, you’re my favorites forever. Oh, and Natasha, because you’re terrifying, plus coffee.” He took a sip, eyes fluttering shut with pleasure.

“How’re you feeling?” Steve asked, idly tapping out a rhythm on the back of the chair. “I don’t think you’ve ever totalled a suit to that extent. It was kind of impressive.”

“I hadn’t realised quite how damaged it was- I mean, I knew the diagnostic results, and I knew how much more the suit could take, but never thought it would take quite that much in one go. I’m going to need to do some tests with the kind of energy Amora was putting out; I’ve never been at such a disadvantage.”

“Not fun,” Bruce said. “I’m running some diagnostics and getting more of a handle on the frequencies and readings Jarvis was sending- we got readings up to the big explosion that we can take a look at.”

“Great. So. What’s the damage?”

Steve smiled grimly. “Actually, I think you came worst off out of the whole thing. Only minor casualties in the other response teams. Some civilian fatalities, but the evacuation procedure went well. I think the best we’re gonna get out of this is that it could have gone worse. Property damage is, of course, an issue, and I hear insurance premiums are just…off the scale, but that’s more Fury’s headache than ours. The Maria Stark Foundation is helping with temporary accommodation, social services, health insurance, so the worst-hit are getting help.”

“Okay. So, uh…how much blackmail material do you have on me?”

Clint grinned. In fact, everyone did. “Well, we’ve got your full repertoire of pop songs, an extremely slurred rundown of particle physics, and your honest assessment of the whole team, which we’re thinking of putting out as a press release. Jarvis has sent copies to all members of the team, including Fury, Hill and Pepper. I’ve got ‘Tiny Dancer’ as my ringtone.”

“I’ve got Star Spangled Man.”

“Killer Queen.”

“Build Me Up, Buttercup.”

“We gave Fury ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,’” Clint said, and Tony laughed, which sent fire rolling down his ribs and he must’ve made a noise, because Loki rushed over, green sparks arcing from his hands to the bedframe in his agitation, which made all the machines in the room absolutely lose their shit. Thor followed, frowning. Tony forced himself to calm down, took a breath, and smiled at Loki.

“Hey, kid. It’s fine, I’m okay. I need you to calm down a bit, because you’re making all the machines beep. Can you do that?” Loki nodded, and gradually the smell of ozone in the air went away and the machines stopped making noises, although he possibly owed the medical bay a bit of rewiring. “Thor, did this happen before?”

“No, not until he was older, and could calm himself before too much was damaged. Youngling, do you know what is happening?” Thor asked, crouching down and tipping Loki’s chin up so he had to meet his eyes. Loki shook his head, tears in his eyes. He didn’t make a sound. “You have great strength when you are grown, and great wisdom in the cunning arts, as does our father, and this great strength is still in you, but you have much to learn. There is nothing bad in this, your magic is a blessing and a great aid in battle and with healing, but it is like…when I was six, I tried to ride a bull. It did not end well for me, for it was strong and I was unable to control it—well, it ended with me getting caught in a cherry tree a league from where I was aiming to go, with so many twigs in my hair that you laughed until you fell down, because I looked like a bird’s nest,” he said, with a low chuckle. “Now, let us go and see if the tiger and wolf are destined to be come helpmeets.”

Tony was shaking from the adrenaline comedown, and the rest of the team looked similarly concerned. Loki was physically resilient, had accelerated healing and a good immune system, so from an injury perspective, he was a walk in the fucking park. A full on temper tantrum, however, had the potential to level parts of New York. “Ideas? Apart from making a ‘Thor’s life anecdotes’ Youtube channel?” he said, when he was sure his voice would be steady.

“We wait for Heimdall to make contact. In the meantime, we continue as we have been.”

Phil stood up, nodded cordially to them all, smiled at Loki and left. The rest of them drifted out gradually until it was just Tony and Loki again. The floor had been turned into some sort of animal commune, and an interspecies alliance of animals was currently besieging the castle. Loki came over and climbed up on the bed and just sat on top of the covers, looking at him. Tony looked back for a bit, slightly unfocussed. He could feel his attention drift, then the next thing he knew, Loki was flicking his forehead. “I’m pretty sure that was just when I was concussed, Loki.” Loki just smiled at him. “Okay, fine. What shall we do? Are you hungry? Thirsty? Sleepy?”

All headshakes. After giving it some thought, Loki said “Songs.”

“Right, you first.”

“No, you.”

“I think you underestimate how childish I can be, Loki. No, you.”

Loki giggled, then glared, like, the full arms folded, standing up glare. “Nooooo yoooooou!” he half roared, obviously imitating his father, right down to the fact he covered up one of his eyes as he shouted. Tony put his hand up, shaking his head.

“Okay, fine, you win. Right, where do we start…um…right, the classics. I get up in the evening, and I ain't got nothing to say…”

Loki liked the boss, so that was okay. When it was his turn to sing, he sang in a language that Tony couldn’t quite understand, the melody pure and strange. It made him think of rivers and wild things, howls in the night. As they exchanged songs, Tony started formulating a list of rules, of ways to make this whole thing work, rules to keep in his mind and stick by, even if it was hard and he was tired, or he wanted to crawl out of his skin and the only thing that cured it was a circuit board and sweat. He didn’t know if he was the best person to do this, but he knew he had to try, and to keep on trying.

He did his usual thing of bothering the nurses until he was discharged, but Steve blocked his exit with his arms folded until he was actually pronounced okay to go, and Tony tried not to have a tantrum in front of Loki too much. He’d been distracting himself by ordering in a few things he thought Loki would need (a few things. Well, a lot of things, but it was his money)  and planning out Mark X, which might have a coffee machine in the left leg if he could get the plans past Jarvis.

He hated hated hated hated hospitals, but didn’t think any of the team actually liked them, so it was kind of amazing how much time they spent in them for each other, with smuggled in coffee and junk food, poker championships and computer games and whiteboards and sharpies and simply _being there_. The whole team were there to help with all of Loki’s toys, and it was more of a production getting out of the place than usual. Tony was in a wheelchair because of his leg, Loki riding on Thor’s shoulders as Steve pushed, all of them laden with stuffed animals, Bruce carrying all Loki’s drawings with great care with Clint, Coulson and Nat standing back and smirking, but ready to step in if needed.

 It was amazing getting back to the tower, even better seeing Loki’s reaction to it, to the steel and glass and wood floors, to a building that hummed with welcome, because everything he loved, everything he cared about was here, and it still made him grin, every time he came in. Loki’s eyes were wide as Thor turned in a circle slowly in the atrium, letting him take it all in. “You all live here?” he asked, looking down at Tony.

“Yes. I do, and Thor does, and Uncle Cap, Uncle Hawk, Uncle Bruce, Uncle Phil Son of Coul, Aunty Natasha and Pepper sometimes. Aunty Nick doesn’t, but he comes and visits, as does Aunt Maria.”

“Aunty Nick?” Cap asked, but his voice wasn’t so much disapproving as amused. He often seemed confused as to which he should be, which was kind of fun to watch. Tony smiled at him, then pointed towards the elevator.

“Shotgun elevator! Allons-y!” he cried, then burst out laughing as Steve took him at his word and they hurtled across the floor, Steve’s reflexes keeping them from going ass over teakettle and the damn good pain meds he was on helping with his ribs.

 As they got into the elevator, leaving behind a pretty bemused group of people, Tony clearly heard Loki saying “Silly.”

“Aye, brother,” Thor rumbled, a smile in his voice. Tony leaned his head back against the wall of the elevator and grinned up at Steve.

“They’re being mean, Cap,” he said. “That hurts my feelings.”

“Well, Jiminy Cricket, Tony, I guess we’ll have to have a good old group meeting and clear the air, so you can talk about your pain in a constructive and supportive environment,” Steve said, with something that was pretty damn close to a straight face.

“Mean,” Tony told him, but he couldn’t keep the warmth from his voice and the fondness from his smile. “Jarvis, I want Loki to be given full access privileges to my private quarters and workrooms. Other living quarter access parameters to be set by each individual resident. Computer lockdown on internet and news sources referring to any of Loki’s activities as an adult when Loki is present.”

“Understood, Sir. And welcome back.”

“Thanks.”

“What’ll you do if he does find out?” Steve asked.

“Damage limitation. Possibly literally if he goes all green and sparky, but we’ll do our damndest to make sure it doesn’t happen. Look, the way I figure it, our objective is to keep Loki happy, secure and stable until the spell can be reversed. He’s not the person responsible for his older self’s actions, so there’s no reason to tell him, and this isn’t a time loop causality thing blah blah so he won’t turn evil if we don’t tell him...” he trailed off, fluttered a hand in the air to indicate time loops.

“Plus, you’re fond of him,” Steve said, and his voice was softer, eyes gentle.

“It’s dumb, I know. But I like him; he’s a good kid and I want to do my best by him. He’s easy to…”

“Love?” he suggested, and Tony sighed, feeling very old suddenly.

“Which is another dumb thing to do,” he said, and let Steve wheel him out into the main penthouse. At first, he didn’t know quite what he was looking at. “Steve. Was this—uh, did you—that’s all the stuff I ordered,” and it was all put together, brightly colored mobiles hanging from the ceiling, a small table in the corner of the room with chairs around it and art supplies on top of it, a little cot in the same corner, more rugs and blankets and cushions than before. It looked clean and bright and welcoming, and Tony didn’t know how to keep the grin off his face.

“We’ve put the bed and drawing table in the workshop, too, and another bed in your room.”

“Steve, I. Wow. Thank you,” he said, and turned the chair, taking in the beauty of  the glass mobiles with their clouds and suns and lightning bolts, the ships with blue sails, the rune one he’d found on an occult webstore. He loved that they’d done something so sneaky without telling him; Thor was usually kind of bad with surprises. He got all excited and started hugging the recipient for no good reason. “Thanks, Jarvis,” he said then, because someone had to have explained what all the deliveries were for. “Also, I hope you’ve kept footage of this being put up.”

“You’re welcome. And yes, full audio and visual footage has been sent to your secure server.”

“Thor building things again?”

Tony heard a swish behind him, started turning the chair around.

“The cot needed putting together, and it hurts his feelings when hammers don’t come to him when he calls,” Steve said, eyes crinkling at the corners.

“It is not right that they should disobey me. Is that not so, Loki?”

“I. Yes?” Loki said, frowning.

“Ah yes, brother, I wield mighty Mjolnir, and call thunder to me and upon mine enemies.”

“It’s a big hammer,” Clint called out in a muffled voice from behind three stuffed wolves.

“Ah.”

Loki still looked a little bemused, but he was taking everything in from his vantage point (Tony had made the elevator pods double height. Mainly because of reasons) on Thor’s shoulders.

“I love what you’ve all done with the place,” Tony told them all, “and just so you know, if someone doesn’t give me a walking cane in the next three minutes, I will make you all carry me everywhere. Also, I am burning this wheelchair, I hate it, no one can make me use it, I will make a hoverboard and glide around soundlessly,” he announced, grand gestures hampered a little by the fucking wheelchair. Steve levered him up out of the chair and kicked it into the corner, then picked him up princess style as Clint cracked the fuck up laughing.

“The hoverboard could work,” Bruce murmured, already looking around for a pen.

“No,” Steve and Coulson said together. Nat shrugged, jumped up onto the worktop. Steve carried Tony there too and put him down carefully.

“I feel so pretty and delicate,” he whispered to her, and she smiled, patted his hand.

“That’s the pain meds they’ve got you on,” she whispered back. “Enough to knock out a horse. Sleepy yet?” she asked, reaching out and stroking his hair gently.

“Mmhmm.”

He leaned back against the wall, watching as they put the toys away, some into a wooden chest next to the blanket chest, some on the couches, all according to Loki’s points and directions. They had lunch, then, ordered in sandwiches that Tony didn’t want to eat, but Loki wouldn’t until Tony did (he suspected Steve was bribing him) and glasses of milk, which was just too odd to think about (he suspected Coulson hacked the security footage and sent screenshots to Director Fury; there may be milk advertising contracts in the near future) but Steve was all about ‘proper nutrition’, and Tony played along for once, because he was apparently meant to be an example.

Then, there was a nap. Well, sort of. It was more everyone pretending to be asleep so that Loki wouldn’t think he was missing anything by going to bed for a bit, Thor snoring ostentatiously as Loki sat on his chest and flicked his forehead, until Loki actually fell asleep on Thor, and everyone else kind of…fell asleep, too. Pepper came in just as Tony was waking up, and stood with her hands on her hips, surveying the scene with a fond smile. She slipped her shoes off and padded over to curl up next to him and they sort of dozed in comfortable silence for a bit.

The meds were wearing off, and he didn’t know if he wanted to take his next dose. He was feeling sharper headed, the lassitude clearing, and the payoff between pain and clarity of thought was something he’d not yet gotten to grips with. Every time he was injured badly he had the same internal debate until it turned into bargaining: could he take the anti inflammatories without the pain relief, could he wean himself off any of the drugs gradually, what pain his body could withstand because being drugged was something he…it wasn’t his favorite thing.

The next time he woke up, Bruce was looking at him in that sharp doctorish way he had sometimes.  “One more day of the full dosage, then we’ll see how it goes,” he said, and raised both his eyebrows when Tony opened his mouth. “If you behave, I’ll show you the hoverboard designs,” and damn, he had Tony’s number.

“Baby you’re so good to me,” he said, looked up at him through his lashes. Bruce shook his head with a little huffed laugh, then handed him a glass of water and his next dosage of meds. Pepper and Phil were sat side by side reading reports, Thor was sending sparks across what looked like an extremely jerry rigged Van der Graff Generator and Loki was sending sparks back with his tongue sticking out in concentration, Clint and Natasha were probably off either sparring or spying, and Steve was off taking the art class he thought none of them knew about.

They sat idly discussing Bruce’s research for a bit, calling up holos and sending figures whizzing into graphs and spiral curves, all the beautiful numbers up in blue with grids and frames and their hands and minds to guide them. He was working on getting Doctor Foster over to New York, which made Clint and Phil grimace for some reason and mutter about assistants, but it might just make Thor explode with happiness having her around.

“Is that some stealth control teaching I’m seeing over there?” Bruce asked, looking over to Thor and Loki. Tony watched them for a bit.

“Yeah, looks like. Good. He’s, uh, good with him.”

“Well, yeah, they’re brothers. Which…means you’re kind of Thor’s surrogate mom.”

“No no no, that’s Capsicle, has to be,” he protested and seriously, why would he be the mom? People were so wrong about things. Bruce just smiled. Tony sighed and leaned back into the cushions, resting his head on Bruce’s shoulder. “Fuzzy head,” he murmured, then felt the world slip away again.

He missed bath time, but was woken up by Loki, now wearing pajamas with a polar bear on the top and snowflakes on the bottoms. Behind him were Thor, Clint and Phil, all a little damp. Thor had bubbles in his hair. All three looked a little like they needed a drink. It was only the pain in his ribs that was keeping Tony from rolling about on the floor laughing at them. “Good bath?” he asked Loki, who nodded proudly.

“I do not understand your Midgardian baths, but the bubbles were pleasing, as was the yellow bird that squeaked. I have also brushed my teeth.”

“Good. That’s good. I love the pajamas, and I guess I know now why there’s toothpaste behind Uncle Hawk’s ear, right? And…trajectory, hmm, possibly magically propelled…on a scale of one to lots, how covered in toothpaste is the bathroom mirror?”

Loki looked thoughtful. “Lots.”

“In truth, great sport was had in the room of bathing. I fear I must wash my beard, lest my food should taste of this mint of pepper,” Thor said, and Tony sort of lost it, trying to keep his laughter non-painful, because Clint and Phil had complete non expressions on their faces, Thor had toothpaste in his beard and his bathroom was probably completely covered in bubbles, and this was probably going to happen _every single time_ Loki had a bath and Thor was involved. He made wheezing noises for a bit, then calmed down enough to open his eyes. Loki looked ridiculously proud of himself.

Loki would be sleeping at nights in Tony’s room, at least at first, and they made their way there, Tony with the help of a cane, after Loki had said good night to everyone with great dignity. The bed in Tony’s room was twin sized, low on the floor, with dark blue sheets showing the constellations in silver and dragons carved on the wooden frame. Wolf and Dragon were on Loki’s pillow already, and he put them on either side of him when he got in.

“Do you want a story before you go to sleep?” he asked Loki, who nodded.

“Okay, I don’t know much about bedtime stories—”

“Science,” Loki cut in, then frowned. “I apologise for interrupting. I wish to hear more about Midgardian Science,” he asked formally.

“That’s okay Loki, thank you for saying sorry. So, um…we were up to flight physics and thermals, I think.” Tony lowered himself into the chair. “Jarvis, lights down to thirty percent.” In the dim light, he called up holographic diagrams that spun and moved, Loki’s eyes growing gradually sleepier as he tried to focus on the blue glow as he talked of the bird’s wing, the first planes, updraft and drag and landings until he breathed softly, lashes casting shadows on his cheeks, lips parted, Wolf and Dragon (he really didn’t hold with naming things, apparently) held close.

Tony kissed his forehead and left as quietly as he could. Once he was in the doorway, the lights dimmed and went out until there was just the soft glow of a nightlight next to Loki’s bed. He left the door open a little, and made his painful way to the penthouse, with the tentative feeling that this might just work out.

He had to factor in a lot more Dramatic Pauses than usual in his walk to the elevator (there may or may not have been poses, but fuck it, what the fuck else was he meant to do with a pimp cane?) and by the time he’d made it into the penthouse he was about ready to claw his fucking leg off. Without even looking away from his pile of forms, Phil threw a bottle of pills, which he caught then juggled with the cane for a bit. “Thanks,” he said, dry swallowing them. It helped if he thought of them as another necessary step on the path to having a hoverboard, which was a worthy aim.

“Does my brother sleep?” Thor asked. He was sat on the floor, Natasha doing a series of intricate plaits in his hair. Next to her on the couch was a metric fuckton of bobby pins and a comb. Tony could never work out whether Thor asked Nat to do his hair, or Nat asked Thor if she could use him like a Barbie doll, but they both seemed very content with the whole thing. Clint was on stapler duty next to Phil, which involved Phil throwing the completed forms up in the air and Clint stapling them together midair, an act which was a shoe-in for the office stationery circus that Tony hadn’t quite gotten round to setting up.

“Yes. Good as gold.” Tony lurched around the couch, sat down next to Nat and settled in to watch the Clint and Coulson floorshow. “Is Bruce in the lab?”

“Yes. He is conversing with the Lady Jane, so that we may have speech with my father,” Thor rumbled, his voice mellow and pleased. They sat in silence for a while, only the regular flutter of pages then the slam of the stapler to interrupt. Tony was still for as long as he could manage it, then started designing some more of the suit on his pad. He kind of preferred the conducting approach to construction, preferred the grand gesture, the spinning graphics, all the lines flowing together and blowing apart at his fingertips, then the sweat of welding and beating and the circuitry, the bruised knuckles and the burnt fingerpads.

This was contained, meticulous. Not nearly messy enough.  He found himself segueing into hoverboard design and made a mental note to do the suit building when he wasn’t strung out on caffeine and not enough sleep, because that would lead to a Mark X with a hoverboard attached to its feet, which would probably involve Iron Man getting around in a surfer pose (he loved that idea. Fucking loved it. Fury probably wouldn’t.) which had style, but would lead to an incredible number of lame cartoons in the press.

He looked down at Thor, who had an incredible spiral of plaits all around his head, then up at Nat, who shrugged. “I never had dolls as a child,” she said with a slight smile, which reminded Tony of something he’d wanted to ask, but wasn’t quite sure how.

“Has anyone here actually had a childhood? Like, one like you’ve read about?” because he was fed, and clothed, and learnt manners and was educated, and his mother, his mother was lovely but he wasn’t sure if she’d ever wanted him, and his father was…his father found it easier to call him a creation, like he wasn’t a person, but a memory bank, a receptacle for his father’s genius, a learning bot. Never just a kid. They were all looking at him with wry smiles.

“I did,” Phil said. “Well, uh, I didn’t have shoes, but that was more because I hated wearing them. I went feral for a bit, but my parents are hippies so it was okay with them.” Tony couldn’t quite get his head around that…it was…“I assume you are referring to a stable and loving home environment?”

“Sorry, I, uh. I think my brain just exploded. Tiny hippy…sorry. But yeah, that. I feel like I have no context for childhood, or parenting, but that’s not really what we’re doing, it’s custodial, and different cultural norms and expectations…sorry, just thought of you in a flowery robe, Phil—ouch, Clint, I didn’t mean in an objectifying way, staples shouldn’t be used in combat and how the hell did you get the stapler to fire them anyway? What I’m trying to get at, I think, is holy fuck we are not equipped to look after a small child, and on a smaller scale, holy fuck I am not supposed to be in charge of a small child, even if he’s imprinted on me for some reason, and what if I mess up, because I’m not exactly parent material, and how do I know how to feed him? What if he hurts himself? What do I do if— argh—Thor? Is that—oh. Hugging?”

“Ssh, mortal,” Thor soothed as he very carefully wrapped Tony up in a very warm, very muscular hug. It felt ridiculous, but in a good way, and Tony knew from experience that escape was completely, completely futile, so he relaxed into it, closing his eyes. “In truth, we are surprised it has taken you this long to unburden yourself, Man of Iron,” which translated to ‘wow, we’ve been braced for a meltdown for _ages_.’

Every time Tony tried to speak, he was patted on the head and hushed. The rustle and snap of stapling started up again, and Tony went into a floaty daze for a bit. It took a while to register that Thor was speaking again: “And I had little talent for magic, which was called seiđr, which is a word that means ‘unmanly,’ and is negative in our world. I knew not that Loki was so sick at heart that all his work, all his thought, all his skill was counted as little. But here, you Midgardians know and value science, and I would have Loki living with people who understand it, who think of it not as a clever child’s trick, or a novelty, or something that it is better to have another dirty their hands with, but as something of as much use as a sword well wielded, or an arrow in matchless flight. Even if it is but for a short time, I would have him know that.”

“What if he stays young?”

“Then he will know it for longer,” Thor told him with the air of one concluding an argument, nothing else to say, move along here…it wasn’t. It completely wasn’t concluded, but Tony knew that there was no point getting into an argument with him about something with so many unknown variables. Thor released him from his hug (God, Thor was on his and Pepper’s acceptable fuck list for a reason—actually, thinking about it, there wasn’t an Avenger who wasn’t, and he’d put Fury on the list as a curveball, but thinking about it, he totally would and oh wow was this harassment even if it was in his head and—)

“Tony?”

 “Steve! Don’t make me go to sensitivity training again, I swear I didn’t mean it, please.”

Steve looked at him. “You do know none of us have developed mind reading skills, don’t you?” he asked, then put his briefcase down and sat in an armchair. “I thank the lord every day that we haven’t.”

“Seconded,” Bruce said, strolling into the penthouse with a slightly guarded look in his face. He started making tea, enough mugs out for everyone, which meant this was turning into a crisis meeting. Everyone shifted around so they were in a loose circle, stayed quiet until the tea was finished. Bruce brought his tea over, blinked when Tony put his hand out for it, then smiled a little as he handed it over. “Thor, if I were to say Odinsleep, how badly messed up would you think things were?” Bruce asked when they were all settled down. Thor sat back, mug tiny in his hands.

“Much depends on how long my father sleeps for. My mother will rule in his stead, and a wise job she will make of it. As Asgard faces no great threat, as I have not been summoned home, I shall stay here, with my brother, unless the Lady Jane should create a bridge between our worlds once more. So…my brother shall remain in small form, and I shall remain with him until father awakes.” He spoke slowly, looking out across the room as if he were spanning worlds and centuries. “I fear Loki was tangling with those we have been fighting, that he is not safe from them even now. I would have our father protect him.”

“So you think it wasn’t just that he was fighting on our side for those three battles?” Phil asked, writing something down.

“A spell of that nature takes time to create, more time when it is aimed at someone specific. It would take months to construct for someone such as my brother.”

“He knew about the spell. He knew. When we went into the building. He said it was a trap,” Tony said, a tense, sick feeling in his stomach.

“Aye. He went with you anyway. It puzzles me, but gives me much hope.”

“Hope?” Steve asked. He was leaning forward, his eyes lit up with that sort of bloodhound look he got sometimes.

“He is stronger than the spellcaster. He knew he was. In battle, he would best her. Do you not see? A spell with roots, that has been fed and nurtured is not the same as one flung in a fight. It is stronger, more difficult to divert from its purpose. You know that my brother, in general, avoids battles he cannot win, and yet he went to the place where the spell was strongest. He fears not her magic, and changed her spell as much as he could to his greatest advantage.”

Phil smiled wryly. “If getting turned into a three year old was the best outcome, I don’t want to see the worst.”

Thor laughed. “My brother is changeable of shape and character. It is his strength. He has spent time as many things, and has suffered no ill effects. Even his breasts went within a month of giving birth.”  Tony felt his brain shutting down a bit. Nat just looked speculative, Steve cleared his throat and it looked like Clint and Phil were having one of their completely silent debates where they didn’t even seem to move, but there was a whole conversation going on under the surface. Bruce looked tired, fingers tapping out an idle rhythm on the arm of the couch. Tony leaned into him a little and got a smile in return.

“We should bring Doctor Foster to New York. I mean, the three of us working on this…plus, I bet Thor has good post-bang bed head,” Tony whispered to him.

“Speaking of hair, I was wondering about the braids,” Bruce whispered back. “Are he and Nat playing with each other’s hair?”

“I think it’s…bonding? Or something. But Thor does a mean French braid, I had no idea.”

Tony sipped his tea, feeling sleep start to overtake him. He took the pills Bruce gave him obediently, let things wash over him for a while. Steve helped him to his living quarters as he complained about the meds and told Steve all about the hoverboard, all in mixed up sentences until he was talking about repulsor dosages and aerodynamic cottonmouth, but Steve just said ‘yes, Tony’, because he was a wise, wise man of wisdom. He didn’t bother getting undressed, and sort of leaned against the door and tried not to get toothpaste all over his face, then he spread-eagled on the bed and sunk into sleep.

He woke up to Loki making shadow puppets in the light cast by the arc reactor. At some point he’d rolled over onto his back, and Loki was sitting by his left hip, fluttering his fingers. “Butterfly, right?” he murmured, still half asleep. Loki nodded. “Bad dreams?” Another nod. Tony  managed to flail enough to get a pillow under himself, then pulled himself into a more upright position. “Do you think you can get back to sleep? You can stay up here if you want, just don’t take all the covers,” he said, looking up in time to see Loki smile. “Right, uh. Sheets. How’re you at burrowing? I think I’m sleeping wrong. I forgot how to,” he told Loki plaintively, then did a highly undignified shuffle until he was actually under the covers, the right way up. They lay on their sides, facing each other.

“What’s the light?” Loki whispered, face bathed in blue. Tony tried to think of the simplest answer he could that was true.

“It’s my heart,” he said. Loki nodded.

“Pretty,” he said, then closed his eyes and snuggled into the pillow, Wolf and Dragon clutched in his arms. Tony rolled onto his back and smiled.

The next time he woke up, Pepper was taking pictures with a look of unholy glee on her face. At some point, custody of Wolf had been transferred from Loki to him, and he had it hugged to his chest. Loki was next to her with a beaker of milk. The pain in his ribs and shoulder had lessened, and his leg was feeling a little less ripped to shreds. He got himself upright.

“Shower shower shower,” he mumbled, completely aware he sounded like a crazy person, but also that Pepper would explain to Loki that he maybe wasn’t, then he ruffled Loki’s hair and got himself to the bathroom. He was still bruised and scratched to shit, but the water felt good on his skin, helped to finally get rid of the last of the brick dust in his hair.

Getting dressed was…interesting, but he managed it without breaking any bones. By the time he got into the suite kitchen, Pepper was slicing an apple and handing the pieces to Loki, the coffee maker was working its magic, and on the table were things that looked alarmingly like breakfast foods. Tony suspected the fell hand of Steve Rogers; he was forever trying to get Tony to eat things that weren’t coffee (if you made it right, it was a solid) and he’d caught him making some sort of meal and sleep rota yesterday.

He side eyed a slice of French toast. Pepper looked at him. He ignored the toast. Pepper raised an eyebrow. He took the toast, and started to eat it in as grown up a way as possible. Loki just continued to eat his apple with complete concentration. “Have Midgardians many fruits of the tree?” he asked, once he had finished.

“Hundreds. No, more than hundreds. _Lots_ ,” Tony replied, then swivelled round to get the fruit bowl from the worktop. “See, here’s an apple. Then here’s another sort of apple. And a pear, and a banana, and some grapes, and these are just the everyday fruits.”

Loki nodded, looked at the fruit bowl. “In Asgard, there are orchards. Cherry trees, apples and pears, from blossom in spring to fruit in summer,” he said quietly, with a faraway expression. Pepper put her arm around him. “I miss it,” he whispered, and looked at the table with a small frown on his face.

“Oh, honey,” Pepper murmured and pulled him into a full hug. Bawling, Tony could have coped with, tantrums and howls were easy, but this quiet crying? He hobbled over, stroked Loki’s hair, met Pepper’s eyes with no clue of how to fix this. Once Loki had stopped crying and they’d cleared the breakfast things he was pretty composed once more. He sat back down, idly spinning an apple on the table, wishing he could do something more than a grand gesture—

 He paused as he was struck by a brilliant idea. “Jarvis,” he called.

“Yes, Sir?”

“I would like all of the fruit,” he proclaimed, feeling a little bit like Thor. “All of it. Every type you can get hold of.”

“Tony,” Pepper said warningly. He grinned at her.

“We are going to have a fruit party, and it’s going to be amazing,” he said, tilting his head up for a kiss. She kissed Loki on the forehead, too, then set off for the landing pad. “A fruit party, Loki. I have the best ideas in the world.”

“Silly,” Loki said firmly.

“Maybe a little. But still, I’m a genius. The papers tell me so all the time.”

“All the fruit?”

“All of it.”

They looked at each other and grinned.

The rest of the day was spent taking fruit deliveries (Tony), exchanging impressions of the battle with Reed Richards (Tony), coloring in (Loki) and holding the first Interspecies Stuffed Animal Council of War (Loki and Tony). Tony messaged the rest of the avengers: ‘Fruit party, 5 PM, penthouse. Assemble!’ and they made their way up to the penthouse at four to unpack the fruit. After much deliberation, it was decided that they should order the fruit by color, which was good because there were a fuck of a lot of fruits that Tony had never heard of, so flavor or country of origin were out. Jarvis had printed out preparation sheets where relevant, too.

Thor came into the penthouse pretty early and was put to work peeling an orange by Loki. When Steve, Clint and Phil showed up, Steve’s face lit up like it was Christmas. “Oh my, is that a star fruit? I looked at pictures of that when I was a kid,” which was a little bit heart breaking.

“We’re gonna sample the delights of the fruit kingdom, which is like the animal kingdom, but sweeter,” Tony told him.

They sat down to help with the prep. It turned out that Phil was some kind of chopping ninja, which wasn’t that much of a surprise, thinking about it, and when Natasha wandered in, she took in the scene with a smile hovering on her lips, then did this amazing thing where she produced a wickedly sharp knife from somewhere, spun an apple by its stem and peeled it in one long curl. She gave the peel to Loki, who studied it intently. Clint was mainly good at throwing grapes then looking like he hadn’t, or blaming Loki, whom Thor defended vocally.

As soon as Bruce came in, Tony folded his arms. “I forbid any mention of the technicalities of fruit definition. As of now, the banana is not an herb.”

Thor stood up, holding a pineapple aloft and lifted Loki onto his shoulder. “We also forbid it, as Princes of Asgard. Let no one defame the name of the mighty fruit, not even science! Is that not so, Loki?”

Loki picked up a jackfruit and held it like a sceptre. “Is so, Thor,” he proclaimed with great resolution.

Bruce took in the scene, shaking his head and hiding a grin behind his hand. Natasha wasn’t even bothering to hide a grin; her expression, when she looked at Tony was open, warm and fond. Tony couldn’t stop smiling: the best thing, in his opinion, was thinking of something stupid-oblique-stroke-awesome to do and then seeing it through (especially when Steve cut his orange peel so that when he put it in this mouth it looked like he had hideous orange pith teeth, because apparently that was all the fun to be had in the thirties).

“Okay. Science-free fruit party,” Bruce said in his ‘pacify the lunatics’ voice, then looked at Tony, assessing. “Hoverboard project should be on your server as of now,” he told him, then grinned at Tony’s whoop of joy. “But only after the fruit party.”

What followed was complete anarchy, but in the best way. Strawberries, apples, cherries and pears were familiar to Thor and Loki. Dragonfruit, jackfruit, mango, papaya, lychees and guava weren’t. Bruce and Phil were the most unfazed by the different types of fruit, Bruce because he’d basically been the littlest international hobo for a bit, and Phil because nothing could faze him. Natasha ate a _whole lemon_ without even pulling a face, which made pretty much everyone cringe and dry swallow, and cemented Loki’s opinion that Aunty Tasha was the best person in the world (his little worshipping _face_ ).

By the end, they were a little bit sugar giddy, Bruce was telling them all about animals who got drunk and heartbroken fruit flies going for fermented fruit (which included an impression of a drunk heartbroken fruit fly, which Tony was going to mentally relive for _years_ ) and they were all over sticky in a kind of sugar coma, leaning back in their chairs with glazed faces and shiny syrupy hands.

“Bath,” Tony said, after a long period contemplating the patterns that the rivulets of fruit juice had made on his hands and wrists. Clint and Phil both sent flat stares across the table, but Thor grinned like it was his birthday.

“I shall change my attire!” he proclaimed, and pretty much bounded out of the penthouse.

“Right. So. Pajamas. And a towel. I’d probably better take all the electrical stuff out of my pockets, because I’m fairly sure some of it’s explosive in certain conditions—Steve, it’s fine, I’m not gonna explode, no need to jump on me. C’mon, kid, we can say goodnight once you’re in your jammies. Deal?”

Loki nodded, they shook hands stickily, then made their way to the elevator. Tony wasn’t leaning as heavily on his cane, and they got there faster than yesterday. Loki seemed to be in some kind of fruit trance, and kept asking Uncle Jarvis questions about what he’d just eaten and who ate them, and did dragons eat dragonfruit, and why not, that was silly, but coal was probably a more sensible food for dragons, as on Asgard they did shoot flames and steam from their noses, which would mean eating fruit would make them smell of burnt sugar, and Tony grinned at Jarvis’s responses, which were quick and playful, and fully acknowledged the existence of dragons and their practical dietary needs.

The Choosing of the Pajamas was, apparently, an important matter. Someone had, at some point, bought Loki clothes. He suspected the combined efforts of the whole team (he’d seen them crowded in front of a monitor before, running up an incredible set of online purchases for the purpose of getting Thor some clothes that didn’t go ‘clang’ when he sat down) but the fact remained that Loki had a lot of clothes.

Plenty of those clothes were Avengers merchandise, as Loki loved his Thor clothes to bits. Someone had even got hold of an unofficial Loki shirt, which was adult sized, but skinny adult (trying to destroy New York was fine for hipsters, apparently, if you didn’t destroy their favorite vintage magazine and 45s store in the process) and fitted Loki like a kaftan (which was fine by Loki). There were plenty of band tour shirts, shirts with dragons and wolves, guitars, robots, little space aliens, pajamas with stars, rockets, cowboys, tigers, polar bears, cats, little Converses with blue arc reactors that lit up, which just confirmed Tony’s belief that when his team did something, they did it big (he was so proud).

After some careful thought and some pacing (Tony had assumed toddlers didn’t pace), Loki chose pajamas with little castles on them.  Thor was already in the bathroom when they got there, wearing a pair of boardshorts with ‘surf’s up’ on the back. The tub was nearly full, taps on full blast. It was a corner tub that had raised Steve’s eyebrows when he’d seen it at first (which hadn’t stopped him from keeping the one in his suite), which meant there was ample space for whatever counted as bathing in Asgard.  

“I thought I should be better prepared for bathing this night,” he said with an easy grin. “Brother, I have located more yellow birds for our sport!” There were ten rubber ducks, lined up on the edge of the tub, all different sizes. Tony…really didn’t want to know why there were so many rubber ducks in the tower, because it was entirely possible that he’d ordered them and that they were essential for something he’d been insomniac-engineering, or it could have been someone else who’d bought them but his brain kind of stuttered when he started thinking of possible reasons for buying that number of ducks. Tony shook his head vigorously.

Thor was sniffing bottles of bubble bath as Loki took off then folded his clothes. Tony patted himself down for any tech that he’d forgotten, and found one partway AI-enabled iPod, one screwdriver that glowed blue and hummed, and a programmable loaded dice. He put them all in the bathroom cabinet, then rolled his sleeves up, feeling a little bit as if he were going into battle. He turned round just in time to see Thor pouring about half a bottle of bubble bath into the tub. Loki was doing something to it that made the water foam up with countless bubbles in a matter of seconds. He had the distinct feeling that the situation was slipping fairly rapidly out of his control. If _Agent Phil Coulson_ ended up covered in water after bath time, he didn’t stand a cat’s hope in hell.

About five minutes after Loki launched himself into the water with a war cry, he felt a little bit like Captain Ahab on acid. Parts of the bathwater were _ice_ , there was some form of battle going on between rival factions of ducks, and he was on a wooden chair at the edge of the tub sculpting a castle out of bubbles that would be used as Thor’s faction’s backup fort if the battle didn’t go his way, as Loki conducted underwater sabotage missions on his foundations which generally involved swimming under the fort and standing up suddenly with a head covered in bubbles.

He wasn’t entirely sure that this was how baths were meant to happen, but Loki was getting clean at least. He called a halt to the battle when Loki managed to create some sort of glowing whirlpool in the middle of the tub (please dear God not a portal. He didn’t need a transdimensional bathtub; it would just be awkward) and got towels for all three of them.

He remembered his mom drying him off when he was a kid after a bath sometimes. She’d kiss him on the forehead if he stayed still for her. He did the same with Loki, getting his hair so it wasn’t dripping, drying the rest of him as he stood obediently. Thor shook himself off like a dog, laughed at Tony’s squawks, scooped up a large handful of bubbles then ran off with a war cry into the rest of the tower.

“I have no idea,” he muttered. Loki tugged his pyjama top straight then wiped droplets off his face with one hand. “Right, so d’you think you can brush your teeth without covering the mirror tonight?”

“That was an accident. It tasted odd, and the bubbles were unexpected. Uncle Phil did not warn me and so I…poofed it away,” he said with a completely guileless expression. Tony raised both his eyebrows, and after about half a minute’s staring match, Loki gave up and smiled.

“Thought so, kid.” He ruffled Loki’s hair, got his toothbrush and toothpaste. “Now, let’s see if you can avoid any toothpaste projectiles this time.”

The mystery of where Thor had run off to was solved when they went to the penthouse so Loki could say goodnight to everyone. There was a trail of damp footprints down the corridor, some droplets on the doorframe and, in the penthouse itself, signs of a scuffle. In the middle of the floor, Natasha, Clint and Phil were all sitting on a damp and laughing Thor. Judging by the board shorts on the back of the couch, a damp, laughing and _naked_ Thor. “You know, the papers already call this place a frat house,” he said to no one in particular. “Do I want to know what happened?”

“Probably not,” Bruce muttered from where he was sitting on the couch, a book balanced on his knees.

“Definitely not,” Steve said. He was writing another letter, probably to one of his old soldier friends in England (with a slightly more interesting service record than most soldiers, but that was the Howling Commandos for you; if you got through the war, you got a covert ops job and/or a shiny costume to wear). The pen looked tiny in his hands, and he had a small wooden board to lean the letter on; it made him look like a giant in a schoolroom.

With very little effort, Thor stood up, gently set Phil back on his feet and held out his arms as Clint and Natasha wrapped their legs around his torso. Tony mentally filed that image away, looked down at Loki, who seemed completely unconcerned about his brother’s naked strongman act. Asgardians were _weird_.

“We could make money with this,” Clint remarked, then jumped down and glared at Thor with his hands on his hips. “No putting bubbles in the fridge. Or the coffee machine, because it’s Stark engineered and would probably explode. Where do bubbles belong?”

“In the room of bathing,” Thor answered meekly.

“That’s right. Now go put some clothes on.”

Natasha dismounted neatly and sat on the couch, then Thor snagged a blanket and wrapped it around his waist. “Is this better, little hawk?”

It was basically a fleecy sarong. Clint shrugged and Phil pinched the bridge of his nose for a few seconds. “It’ll do,” he said, took the cap off his pen and went back to making marks on a map.

“You tired?” Tony asked Loki. Loki shook his head, so they sat down. Tony started working on the Mark X and Loki watched, sometimes asking questions. Tony got a separate program set up, a 3D drawing prototype he was working on for Steve, and grinned as Loki got acquainted with it, tongue sticking out in concentration as he made glowing blue lines, then shaky shapes. In the workroom, he had it set up so the person drawing could fling out colors, move with it, take up all the space they needed. Here, it was finger-painting with light.

“Tony, is that a _papoose_?” Phil asked suddenly. Tony jumped, looked down at the back section he’d been working on at the same time as watching Loki.

“Yup. I’m working on visibility and ventilation at the moment, trying to work out if a separate HUD is feasible. What, the kid might need a ride someplace. Ice cream, maybe. Hot dogs in Central Park, milkshakes…flying’s cool.”

Phil smiled at him. “I admit, I’m impressed by your safety consciousness, which is a sentence I never thought I would say, given your propensity for blowing things up in the name of science and your reckless disregard for any protection above safety goggles which you _assure_ SHIELD psychologists isn’t a death wish, which leads me to wonder if it’s stupidity.”

Tony let him talk it out; he assumed that this speech had been building for a while given how many times he’d done amazing things in the name of science, justice and the future. When he’d finished, Tony shook his head, saddened beyond words.

“Slander! Vile slander. Agent Son of Coul, you hurt me. I might just tell you how that makes me feel, to be hurt when I’m in my safe and non-judgmental space.”

“Please don’t,” he said firmly, still smiling.

Tony ducked his head to hide his own smile and went back to the life support schematics. Once Loki had stopped drawing and slumped into Tony’s side, he saved Loki’s picture (possibly a horse) and woke Loki up enough to say a sleepy goodnight to everyone.

Thor scooped him up and carried him, mumbling sleepily, to his bed. “Goodnight, brother,” he whispered, and went off to exchange sweet nothings with Jane (‘Call Jane’ was the only option on the phone Tony had given him. It was safer not to give him too many choices).

On a whim, Tony went down to his workshop. It was far below all the residential areas of the tower, and would withstand anything short of a nuclear bomb. His suit— well the remains of it— had been packed up and put next to the door of the elevator (if SHIELD went any further than that, lockdown was activated. Tony didn’t share his toys). Dummy, Butterfingers and You collectively got it into the workroom proper, and he opened the case. The suit had been cleaned, which meant SHIELD had more blood samples from him, which meant Fury’s clone vampire colony was nearly complete.

He laid the suit out on the table, getting it out of the case one handed. This part was a ritual, getting the suit ready to be put in its glass case, repairing it if possible, or just leaving it as it was, a memento of a battle. This suit was unusable. Having a building fall on it would have been enough, without the spell frying the circuitry to hell. He ran his hand over the metal, the dents and scrapes, the curling twisted joints, the hydraulics, snapped pistons, a suit that had been patched through more battles than it should. He closed his eyes and made his touch both an apology and a benison. The workshop door hissed open.

“Oh, Tony,” Pepper said, and walked in, carrying two plates of pasta. “How’re you feeling?”

He cleared his throat. “Better than I was.”

“That’s more a sliding scale than an answer, Tony, considering that you had a building fall on you.”

“Details,” he said with a one shouldered shrug, and they went together to the couch in the corner of the workroom. Pepper sat with her shoes kicked off, legs curled up underneath her. She had a smudge of ink on the side of her neck, and her hair was coming loose from its bun. They sat and ate quietly as Tony breathed in the comforting smells of oil, metal, smoke, the warmer smell of Pepper’s perfume. “I’ll wire the suit together, I think. See if I can build a bit of a frame for it. But I want to leave in the dents and the damage. Is that weird?”

“A little—but understandable. I used to do that with running shoes. It showed they’d had a useful life.”

“But the smell, Pepper, a room full of running shoes that had been used until they fell apart…the smell would be unholy, not that your feet would ever smell, but my point stands.”

She raised her eyebrows and put her feet in his lap. He stroked them absently. “I’ve noticed that whenever you say ‘my point stands’, there isn’t one,” she remarked.

“Foiled again.”

“You poor darling.”

The next morning, he woke up feeling a little better. At some point, Loki had crawled into bed between him and Pepper and was sleeping soundly, the soft morning light creeping through the windows. He watched them both sleeping for a bit, then slipped out of bed and out into the corridor in his pajamas (he had no idea he owned pajamas. According to Pepper, he’d had them for years), feet bare. When he got into the penthouse, Natasha was up, hands curled around a mug of tea.

“Morning, sunshine,” she said; her voice was always huskier in the morning. He’d assumed she didn’t sleep, and the mornings when she wasn’t quite awake, it was like seeing a tiger purring.

“Morning,sugar,” he cooed back with a smile, and got the morning news aggregate up on display in the kitchen area. The picture on all the top stories made him freeze, blood cold, stomach dropping. They were all of Loki. His first thought was that the papers knew about the spell and its effects, which suggested a fucking serious SHIELD leak. The headlines, though, told a different story.

“Nat, you might wanna come and look at this,” he said, trying to keep his voice as level as possible. She came over quickly, scanned the pages with her lips parted. There, in ten different ways, was the same story: ‘The Avengers Fraternize with Insane Alien Who Tried to Take Over the World.’

Worst thing was, it was true, and their PR was always going to be a balancing act considering what they did and how much they scared people. Someone must have seen the scruffy hipster using magic on the shaky camera phone footage and it just took one phone call to get the whole of the American gutter press and every right wing fuckwit who had more opinions than sense to start flinging mud about loyalty and aliens not belonging and seeing what stuck. Actually, scratch that. The worst thing was how bad Thor got when people were really mean about his brother.

“Jarvis, restrict Thor’s internet access until further notice. Or, uh…disable his commenting access…no, those are funny, uh, keep the commenting interface but send all comments to my server, keep them off the message boards. How bad is it, Nat?” he asked, already planning the font the newest additions to Thor’s Wall of Keysmashing Internet Smiting are going to be in. (He put the best ones in gothic font. It’s an actual wall, in the communal gym, and sometimes he goes in there and reads them to cheer himself up.)

“It’s caps lock bad. I mean, we didn’t think people would be happy about it, given that it seems as if Loki got away with nearly taking over the world, but they’re going for the army of dangerous misfits angle again,” she tilted her head to one side, the corner of her mouth quirking up, “which we are, of course. They’re, uh. Pretty mean about Loki.”

“What? He’s only three! Oh, yeah. Older Loki. What can we do? I mean, Fury’s probably got some PR bullshit wizardry planned, so we can see how he spins it, but the heat’s gonna be on us for a bit. Also, I’d like to know who leaked this,” he said grimly.

Natasha nodded. They turned to look out of the window at the same time, as a giant bolt of lightning split the morning sky.

“Well, I guess he’s just found out,” he murmured, eyebrows raised. Natasha’s laugh was warm, a little wry. They turned to watch the rain together.

There was a press release, some public appearances and an internet video Thor made and posted to his Youtube account. The problem was that the Avengers were only really seen when shit got serious. They weren’t rescuing-kittens-up-trees types. Steve was the exception; he liked to walk places, and was physically incapable of not helping old ladies across roads and foiling bank robbers, but Clint and Natasha’s work was more…assassination, and Bruce didn’t like crowds.

Thor was probably the most public-spirited of them all, but that was because he was a prince, and he was a man of the people because of that, and personal and private didn’t have the same definition when you ruled a world. On earth, this translated to a Facebook page where he put pictures of himself holding boxes of Pop Tarts and cats dressed as superheroes, a Twitter account which he spammed periodically, and a Youtube account which, as far as Tony could tell, he used to comment on clips of people putting things in microwaves and photo montages set to anything classic Motown and to upload clips of himself dancing, or putting things in toasters, or challenging people to shows of strength and skill. He’d embraced social media in a way that was completely baffling. He was also pretty much invulnerable, and loved people, so New York (and beyond) was his playground.

It took Thor a week to stop sulking completely. It was hard to keep discussion of the news story away from Loki, so on the day after the story broke, Tony took him down to the workshop for the first time. He had the corner with the bed and table already set up with drawing materials for him, and there was the drawing program Loki had loved so much set up, too, with some modifications.

On the wall by his bed, Tony had covered a large area with cork making a giant noticeboard. On it, he put the pictures Loki had drawn that weren’t on the fridge and some pictures of wolves and stars and rockets he’d got Steve to draw. Loki grinned when he saw it and grinned even wider when he saw Dummy and decided he was the best climbing frame in the world because he _moved_.

Tony worked on his poor broken suit as Loki explored. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t tell Loki not to touch things, and he’d also promised himself he’d answer every one of Loki’s questions, so they talked as he worked and Loki poked.

Loki loved the blue of the designs, as Tony made pictures and calculations, sending things flying with his good arm. It was probably the closest thing to another person doing magic he’d seen on earth, and he tracked the light with wide eyes. They fell into working together. One of the things Tony had made sure he’d done when the tower was being remodelled was to put a sound system in every room, and voice access to the Starktunes mainframe.

Once he’d taught Loki to use it, they took it in turns to choose the music, which taxed Jarvis’s lateral processing capabilities to the limit, because Loki’s idea of a music choice was ‘dancing Thor music’ (Blondie. He wondered, sometimes) and ‘Uncle Cap Happy Music’ (Glen Miller. Sad music was A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square) ‘Aunty ‘tasha singing music’ (something in Spanish, sweet and sad, with a swing to it and the sound of rain in the background) ‘Uncle Hawk waiting music’ (Chick Corea) ‘Uncle Phil happy music’ (Star Spangled Man. Tony was so glad they got to keep him). The only one of Loki’s requests that had stumped Jarvis so far was ‘Hulk music’, because apparently ‘Mr Hulk has not expressed a preference for any music in my presence.’

Loki nodded thoughtfully and waited until Bruce next came to the workshop and asked him. Bruce blinked, took off his glasses and polished them with his shirt cuff. “He hasn’t really heard much music. I think…something that makes a lot of noise. A full orchestra, big brass and drums, crashing cymbals…something big and happy.”

“Uncle Jarvis?”

It turned out that Hulk music was the Saint-Saëns Organ Concerto. Loki smiled and went back to trying to teach Dummy how to jump, and Tony and Bruce went back to working on the hoverboard prototypes. The music built and built, and when the organ kicked in, they all stopped working and stood in the middle of this big, beautiful noise with stupid grins on their faces. Loki started dancing with Dummy, arms out and feet flickering as he spun. Later, when the workshop was quiet and still, Tony went through the footage of Loki dancing, printed out copies of the best frames. He put one on the fridge, gave one to Thor, put two on the board in the corner and one in the file he was trying not to think too hard about.

He spent a happy evening programming the surveillance feeds to take snapshots, then a happier morning teaching the rest of them how to use the cameras (saying ‘vogue’ and pointing at the thing they wanted a picture of, which was worth it for the way Clint’s hip stuck out when he pointed) and setting up a printing station in the mailroom. Loki got the hang of it pretty quickly, copying poses like a pro. Soon the wall was nearly covered in things Loki wanted pictures of.

He got less shy with the others, wandering from the workshop to find them when he was bored with drawing or helping. Tony figured Jarvis would keep an eye on him, and Loki always came back to the workshop to tell him all about his adventures, some of which involved crawling through air vents with Clint, which was sort of awesome, sort of concerning. When he found out that Steve liked to draw, he asked Tony if Steve could have big drawing tables next to his, so they could ‘work together’, which made Steve give this small, pleased smile. It became a familiar sight, the two of them side by side, heads bent, concentrating hard.

He joined Natasha in the gym as she was doing her daily ballet warm-ups, which were difficult because his feet didn’t make mermaid tails like hers but he liked the jumping bits, and played pairs with Bruce (who had suggested snap, because his sense of humor was warped beyond belief), filled in forms alongside Phil (drew spiders all over them), and had pretend videoconferences with Pepper whenever she was away.

Thor took him flying all over the place, took him to visit Doctor Jane Foster in New Mexico, who won the Loki seal of approval (a picture of her in felt tips), up mountains, down into canyons. Sometimes they just threw an inflatable globe up in the air and went to wherever was on top when it landed.

Tony started measuring his healing rate by how easily he could get dressed in the morning. He was getting there, he really was. He and Loki even left the tower a few times, mainly to go to parks and green spaces. They had Thor or Steve or, when they were out of state, SHIELD agents with them, which rankled but hey, no suit. It was cool seeing Loki’s reaction to the size and scale of things, the skyline and the trees with the silver behind. From what Thor had told them about his home world, New York was utterly alien (ha) to him.

The team kept getting called to different states, different types of problem. Hydra was still in operation, and apparently artefact-stealing, mad-scientist, pill-chomping lunatics preferred unpopulated areas. They’d been chasing whispers for a few months, and the team was off chasing one in Utah. The tower was damn quiet without them.

They were working together in the penthouse when the call came through from Fury. “Have you lost them? I’m pretty sure they’re in Utah, and I’ve been benched, so.”

“Stark. There’s a giant snake in Brooklyn. We’ve got no one else to deal with it, and you’re our best distraction,” and Fury must have been desperate if he was admitting that. Tony called up the internet onscreen, started going through news bulletins and Twitter for more details.

“That’s a pretty populated area,” he said, tapping the side of his mouth with a finger. “Steve’ll have a fit, you realize. I’m a month from being cleared for full active duty.

“Stark, have you got a working suit?”

“Of course I—what kind of fool question is that?”

“A team’s three minutes away from your building. We’ve got a recovery aiding serum—yes, it’s experimental. Agent Hill will be looking after Loki.”

“No!” Loki said loudly, then “no,” a little quieter. Tony closed his eyes briefly.

“Jarvis, I want my best retired suit on the landing pad. Any repairs necessary?”

“No, Mr Stark. Do I need to inform you how inadvisable this is?”

“No, but don’t let me stop you,” he muttered, then crouched down to look at Loki. “Loki. This is just gonna be me flying around making a big noise. It’s safe. I need to get the snake’s attention, so the area can be cleared of people. There’s no one else who can do this.”

“SHIELD agents are in the lobby.”

“Let them in,” he sighed. “Loki, I need to do this. I really do, and I’m sorry, but I’ll come back to you in one piece as soon as I can. Please be good for Aunty Maria. Please.” He pulled Loki into a hug and kept holding on when the elevator doors opened.

“Mr Stark?” Agent Hill said, a little tentatively. “Hello Loki. We need to borrow Tony for a bit. Sorry, kid.”

Tony stood up and let Loki wrap his arms around his leg. “Right, serum me up. If I hulk, you’re all going down.” Maria rolled her eyes and jabbed something into the muscle between his shoulder and his neck. He felt about ten seconds of agonizing pain, then, as his racing heart went back to normal, a feeling of warmth in his muscles, creeping out to bone. It was like changing from palladium in his arc reactor, everything made new, pain and bright sharpness and the smell of metal.

“The energy boost will wear off, but the muscular-skeletal healing won’t. Assuming you don’t turn into a flowerpot or some other side effect—joke, Loki. Sorry. It was a bad joke. Suit up, Stark. NYPD and the army are at the scene.”

“What, you couldn’t get Harry Potter there in time to help with the basilisk? Loki, I need to go. I’ll be back before you know it.” He kissed the top of Loki’s head, walked out to the elevator with the SHIELD agents, leaving Maria and Loki standing together, her hand on the top of his head. He kept looking at them as the elevator doors closed.

The SHIELD agents either side of him avoided eye contact, just gave him the coordinates and left him to do his thing. The feeling of the suit sliding over him was like coming home. He grinned fiercely as he took off. “Jarvis, get me the SHIELD ground team, the fire service and the NYPD on the line. I’m back!” he whooped as he showboated.

“Iron Man, come in,” someone said over the comm.

“Iron Man here. ETA two minutes. What’s the situation?”

“It’s a giant snake. Two blocks long, venomous. Not a basilisk, don’t even start with the Harry Potter references, it’s just weird, they’re kid’s books. Venomous bite, venomous spit with a thirty-foot range. Fast. Eyesight good, smell better. We’d freeze it but it’s just too big.”

“Agent, I was informed by Director Fury I’d be a distraction. I’d like you to think very carefully about how you answer this, because I’d hate to call him a liar, but what do you want from me?”

There was a pause. He could hear screaming, car alarms, broken glass, could see the sheen of the snake’s scales glinting in the sun. “I think your role could be best described as a distraction for the snake that also happens to kill it.”

“Agent, you’ll go far. Where do you want me?”

“By the head.”

“I was afraid you were gonna say that. Jarvis, what protection do we have against magic snake venom?”

“I believe the key is not to breathe it in or let it touch any part of you,” Jarvis replied, his voice full of ‘I told you this was stupid’.

“Right, all air vents closed at forty feet. Keep me notified of air supply reserves.”

He hit the snake with a mild repulsor blast, tracking its reaction speeds. He reared, hissing and spitting, pockmarking his screen in a frankly unnerving way. “Acid spit. Who’d’ve thought?” he murmured, getting out of range. The weak point from his scans was on the roof of the snake’s mouth. He hated it when that happened. “Jarvis, given the corrosion rate on my helmet and the possibility of the snake’s blood being the same substance, how long would I survive inside the snake’s mouth?” he asked, stinging it with blast after blast, keeping its attention with the flashiest flying he knew as the NYPD got people out of cars and busses, from behind trashcans and out of destroyed buildings with glass that looked like it was melting off the windows. There was no one in range of the venom, so Tony got a little more aggressive.

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t just ask that,” Jarvis said and Tony smiled grimly as he sent a stronger blast directly into the snake’s eye socket. It made this shrieking, hissing sound and the spurt of blood pockmarked the pavement.

“Okay, the blood’s acid, too. Gimme a number.”

“Twenty seconds. That is being generous. Then, of course, you’d melt into a bloody heap with the acid eating through the suit,” Jarvis said, unnervingly chipper.

“I’m keeping you away from Clint. He’s a bad influence. Okay, Fire Department, do you read me?”

“Loud and clear. What do you need?”

“I need your biggest, strongest hose. Here’s the plan.”

He directed all speed to hand and foot repulsors, full ventilation system shutdown in place, and positioned himself directly in front of the snake. “Ready?”

“Ready. Good luck.”

He sent a stinger blast, and the moment the snake started to rear he flew at full speed into the snake’s mouth, flight plan on auto because there was no fucking way he could see inside the snake, what with the dark and the acidic blood. It was possibly the grossest and most awesome thing he’d ever done. He went up through the roof of the snake’s mouth at an angle, crunching through bone and muscle and thick scaly hide with numbers flashing at him on the HUD and every warning light imaginable going absolutely crazy. As soon as he was out of the snake, he was hit with a blast of water so strong it sent him off course.

It took all his strength to get himself in front of the blast, braced against it, turning himself carefully so every bit of the armor was washed before it disintegrated completely. When he was nearly out of air, when he was pretty sure he was clean, he flew out of the path of the water and landed as gently as he could. Manual disengage points again probably; this was becoming a habit. He got the helmet off and walked over the pockmarked, sizzling sidewalk to where three of New York’s finest were rolling up a hose. “Thanks guys,” he called out when he was close enough. “Do you wax, too?”

“I think it might be a respray job, Iron Man,” the older guy said with a grin. They stood back and looked at the very dead snake. SHIELD cleanup teams were suiting up all around them. He really didn’t envy them their job at all.

“Does anyone need me around?” he asked the SHIELD agent in the suit who had appeared from nowhere.

“I think you’ve, uh. Yeah. That was absolutely gross. Go have a shower.”

He put the helmet back on, flew at a crawl back to the tower. He reached the landing pad, stepped off it and prepared to prise the armor off himself by hand. He needed a tin opener. As soon as he took his helmet off, he knew something was wrong. Loki was standing close to the edge, green sparks shooting off him, wind whipping around his hair, eyes blank. Maria was a careful distance away. She looked unharmed but shaken. “Did you know he could teleport?” she asked, a slight wobble to her voice.

“Huh.”

Tony took off the rest of his suit as quickly as he could, letting the pieces drop to the floor, twisted and pockmarked. When he was clear of it, he walked over to Loki and knelt down in front of him, the sparks stinging when they hit him, leaving what felt like burns. He put his hand out and touched Loki’s shoulder, then his face, heedless of pain.

“Loki. Look at me,” he said over the sound of the wind that howled around him. “I’m here. I’m safe, it’s okay.” Loki stared, first blank, then with dawning realisation and relief.

“You- you flew into a snake! You said you weren’t fighting!” he shouted, hands shaking, but the light and the wind started to calm down and Tony was able to move them away from the edge, Loki clinging to him like a monkey.

“He made Jarvis show the SHIELD footage,” Maria said, putting a hand on Loki’s shoulder. “He was worried. Then, uh, you flew into a giant poisonous snake and he got even more worried,” she added with a wry smile. “Next thing I know, he’s disappeared and is on the flight pad, and won’t listen to any kind of reason at all, poor kid.”

“Thanks for looking after him. I owe you a drink. Let’s go inside and have a coffee, okay, Loki? You get milk, you spat out the taste I gave you of mine.”

“Because it was horrible,” Loki said, voice muffled in Tony’s legs. “And you’re silly.”

Thanks to the fucking insane untested, will-probably-kill-him-one-day serum, Tony was able to do something he had wanted to do for weeks. He bent down and picked Loki up, carrying him into the elevator. “I’m inclined to agree with you there, kid.”

They sat around the kitchen table with mugs of coffee (and maybe a dash of whisky that made Maria narrow her eyes then take a long, appreciative sip) and warm milk for Loki, going through the debriefing forms together, with printouts of the energy and chemical composition readings the suit had taken for the lab. Loki stayed on his lap for the whole time they sat talking, was sullen and uncommunicative but clingy.

All Tony really wanted to do was have a shower, get some lotion for the magic burns on his forearms then have a quiet drunken freak-out because he had just been covered in _acidic snake blood_. What he ended up doing was reading fairy tales on the couch, trying to get at least a smile out of Loki by doing all the voices.

Bath time was subdued, and when it was time for Loki to go to bed, he was fractious and scared. Tony talked until he was hoarse, told him stories, even sang to him when he was getting really desperate. He took the longest shower he could once Loki was properly asleep, seeing red-black blood when he closed his eyes, then fell into bed, tired beyond belief.

He woke up in darkness to the sound of muffled crying, padded over and carried Loki to the wingback chair in the corner of the room. Orange and blue lights from the city cast shadows on the floor as Tony wished he knew what to do. “I— I _liked_ snakes,” Loki sobbed after a few minutes of quiet weeping.

“You can still like snakes, Loki. Not all of them are really big. You can even like the really big ones, too, but from a bit more of a distance maybe? I like snakes, and wolves, and dragons, and spiders, sharks…sometimes jellyfish if they’re in a tank. But not cockroaches.”

“I don’t like bilgesnipes. But I like the other things others don’t like. Father says it is because I have a good heart,” Loki whispered.

“Your father’s a wise man,” Tony said and settled back to watch the lights of the city, the red and white of the cars and the neon blue. “You know why I had to go and fight, right? I’m so sorry it scared you. I was scared, too.”

They sat together and exchanged snippets of songs, singing softly until Loki fell back to sleep, just as the sky was lightening into dawn. Tony woke up in the chair with a crick in his neck, Loki drooling onto his shoulder, breathing steadily. He carried Loki to his bed and tucked him in, then lay on his own bed watching the ceiling as the room grew lighter. He got an alert from Jarvis that the team was back at seven. “Jarvis, uh…do they know about the snake?”

“I believe they do.” Jarvis sounded a little smug, damn him.

“Huh. Damage control?”

“Good luck with that.” Yes. Smug.

He pulled on a dressing gown and went to face the music. It was worse than he thought; they were watching the footage both from SHIELD and the suit. When he came in, Steve paused it. He had a scrape down the side of his face. All of them looked battered and bruised and tired. Oh, and angry.

“Hi honey, how was the trip? Did you bring me a present?” and deflection was worth a try, surely.

“Please tell me you didn’t fly into a snake with corrosive venom and blood,” Steve said, very very quietly.

“Can’t do that, Cap. Every time I lie, a Smurf dies. Ooh, tough crowd. Look, it was my only option. That thing was—”

“But you’re not fit! You—hang on, your arm. You’re healed.”

“I, uh. Bruce, you might want to step out of the room for this part. Or, uh, get out the weed and bongos.”

Bruce looked at him, expressionless. “I’m already pretty mad at you. It’s fine, I’ve got it under wraps.”

“It was…a healing serum. And it worked! See! I’m fine!” he said, turning in a circle to show how fine he was.

“You…used an untested serum? Haven’t we talked about this?” Natasha asked, and everyone around the table tensed.

“Did I say untested? Did I? How are you getting ‘untested’ from what I’m—”

“Tony. I’d really like to punch you in the face right now. Please stop talking.”

“What, so I can get lectured on something I _had no choice over_? Yeah, no. It was necessary.”

“I hate to interrupt, sir, but Loki’s awake, and is wondering—ah. He’s found you.”

It was amazing. He was just…there, in front of Tony where there had been empty space before. Bruce turned slightly green at the edges, took some deep breaths, both Natasha and Clint reached for whichever concealed weapon they were favoring today.

“Good morning,” he started, but Loki just…glared at him, then went over to Thor, who had been staying out of the whole ‘tell Tony off for doing the right thing’ party.

“Make him stop flying into snakes,” Loki commanded, scowling up at his brother.

“Oh, but it was a glorious flight.”

“It was stupid!”

Thor grinned. “Stupid can be glorious, too, brother.”

Loki huffed, went over to his table and sat facing the wall. Thor shrugged, spread his hands in a ‘what can you do?’ way, fist-bumped Tony and went over to the coffee machine, probably to stroke it and coo at it, which Tony suspected it was starting to expect. Life tip: don’t give kitchen appliances AI.

Tony sighed, scrubbed a hand through his hair. “I didn’t have a choice,” he said quietly, making sure to meet everyone’s eyes. “I would do it again, too.” Steve sighed.

“Okay. It was just…a bit of a surprise. I’d say don’t do it again, but you probably will.”

They shook hands, because Steve was kind of adorably weird about manners, and Tony went over to the fruit bowl, sliced a pear and an apple, buttered a piece of bread and made a plastic mug of weak milky tea. Loki ignored him when he put the tray down in front of him. Tony shrugged and went over to see what devilry Thor was performing with the coffee machine. He had discovered coffee syrups. Tony blamed Clint.

Loki was upset for another day, but Tony lured him into talking to him by taking his measurements for the carrier he was putting onto Mark X. He had suit-building to do. He worked for three solid days on it, through the nights too. Jarvis played Rebecca Black every time Loki needed to eat, and Thor was elected bath and bedtime supervisor, duties he took very seriously. The suit would’ve been made quicker, but he got Loki to help with some of the simpler circuitry and took breaks every so often to sit with him at his workshop table to drink coffee and draw pictures for him to color in. He damn well stuck to his cardinal rule: don’t send a child away because you’re busy.

Tony and Loki emerged from the workshop sweaty, grimy and covered in oil and paint, Tony a twitching incoherent mess and Loki vaguely amused by the whole thing. Steve threatened to turn the hose on Tony if he didn’t shower, and Tony made sure he filled in SHIELD’s harassment-in-the-workplace form and sent it to HR, which made Phil sign him up for another conflict resolution workshop, because Phil was a complete bastard.

He tested the suit once he’d slept, keeping contact with Loki the whole time, then took Loki for a ride in the carrier, which was brilliant as he had visuals of Loki’s excited face on the HUD as he did loop-the-loops and dives that made Loki laugh and laugh.

It was a Thursday, so they had a suit christening/Thorsday party, and invited Maria Hill and Fury along, and the SHIELD agents who were the best at handling the team (or the ones that gave the most sensible and useful info on the comms). There were hats involved. It was glorious.

Communications with Asgard were a problem that was getting solved gradually, and if he hadn’t had Loki to look after, he’d’ve been in New Mexico with Doctors Banner and Foster and probably helped create a wormhole or something. Making contact with Heimdall had previously seemed to consist mainly of talking loudly and assuming he’d hear them, until Jane’s assistant had left a sheet of Morse Code with ‘For Heimdall’ written on the top and spent the following night decoding energy pulses, which was the best way yet come up with of having a transplanetary chatline.

Apparently, part of Loki’s punishment had been working with his father and mother to repair the bifrost, as full regeneration would take a thousand earth years (and Thor still wouldn’t look a day over thirty). It sounded like a regular family working party. With the work Dr Foster was doing to generate an Einstein Rosen and the bifrost’s partial regeneration/repair, by the time Odin woke up, there would be an easier way to get between planets. Hopefully.

Tony really didn’t want the tesseract going anywhere other than Asgard’s treasure vault, even if it would be in possession of a God. That God had narcolepsy.

Work in New Mexico progressed well. Tony had a mental bet with himself that Bruce was probably there mainly to worship at Dr Jane Foster’s altar (in a strictly non euphemistic way). Tony had sent a load of tech with him, stuff that was hard to source, minerals in short supply, because by the looks of things, Dr Foster could jerry rig with the best of them, but sometimes being a billionaire gave him better access to resources than SHIELD could ever hope to have. He also sent along a collection of pictures of Thor mid bathtime, just so she knew what sort of a God she was (possibly) knocking boots with.

If New York weren’t so full of people, so full of conflicting energy outputs and signals, he’d’ve tried to persuade her to move her operations, but the Einstein Rosen/Bifrost was better off somewhere quiet and secluded. Phil had gone with Bruce, partly in case he went all green, partly to make sure things were okay at the site (mainly to annoy Doctor Foster, because he had a slightly skewed sense of fun).They’d been gone for a week. Tony kept singing to Bruce’s answer machine, just for kicks. Sometimes he and Clint duetted. It was so beautiful.

When he received a summons to SHIELD HQ, he was pretty casual about the whole thing. Natasha stayed behind to look after Loki; he was fairly sure Clint was sending footage of the meeting from the helicarrier. Once he’d finished trying to get Agent Hill to smile, Tony sat in the meeting, trying not to look too terribly bored by the whole thing. Some suit was talking about media coverage, public relations, blah blah blah. Everyone was trying to look interested and failing, except for Thor, who wasn’t looking interested at all, but was non-euphemistically polishing his hammer in a slightly menacing way.

The first clue he had that something was badly wrong was when Fury said “So that’s settled,” because anything being ‘settled’ with Fury was just…it meant bad things, and everyone had agreed to something... he mentally replayed the last five minutes of droning and sat bolt upright in his seat, glaring at Fury.

“Sir, correct me if I’m wrong, but did you just tell us we were being forced to put on our monkey suits and go and talk nicely to those vultures?”

Fury smiled slowly, single eye gleaming with menace. “It is not my policy to force anyone to do anything, Mr. Stark. I’m _asking_ ,” which was the same fucking thing where Fury was concerned.

“No. I hate these things. We all hate these things, I mean it’s cruel and stupid and a waste of fucking time and did I mention stupid? What with putting all of us off duty? That’s just asking for trouble”

“Reed Richards has kindly agreed to lend us his team,” he said, sugar sweet.

“No no no no no. I’ve—I need to stay behind, it’s hell getting babysitters for alien three year olds, there are all these forms to fill in, I’m not going.”

“Mr. Stark, SHIELD—“

“No. I’m not letting SHIELD babysit him, he’ll get scared and worried and he doesn’t know any of them, and he’ll probably teleport them to the Antarctic or Canada.”

“You’re going. You know why? Because I’ll babysit him. He knows me. He even calls me Aunty Nick, and believe me I’m having your ass at that party for that if nothing else. So you’ll go to the damn ball, Cinderella, and you’ll make nice, because at the moment, you’re a dangerously unhinged team of misfits who are in cahoots—the Bugle’s word, not mine—with someone who, not so long ago tried to level New York, and you need to do some fucking glad-handing so the nice journalists say nice things. So suck it the fuck up.”

He had the urge to say ‘this isn’t over!’ or refuse again. Because he was growing as a person, he said “Right. Gala dinner it is,” and tried not to sulk too obviously. When they were out of the meeting, Steve ruffled his hair then slung an arm around his shoulders. Tony was too distracted to complain, just leaned into him.

“Buck up, soldier,” Steve cajoled. “At least we don’t have to sell war bonds.”

Thor caught them up, ruffled Tony’s hair too. “Fear not, Man of Iron, for I have promised many dire things should befall Director Fury should he allow any harm to come to Loki,” and really, who talked like that? (Tony was pretty sure it was partly for his benefit; he did feel a little bit like seal-clapping whenever Thor busted out the Shakespeare in the park).

“You actually stayed behind to threaten him?” Clint asked over his shoulder.

“Aye. I would be a poor brother if I did not.”

There was no arguing with that. Tony called up Pepper to whine at her for a bit, but she sidetracked him into a discussion of Hammer’s latest attempt to get out of prison, an attempt that was about as effective as he would have expected for a man who had more hair than brains.

When they were back at the tower, Natasha raised an eyebrow at Clint, who frowned. “Oh well. It’ll be over by midnight,” she said with a philosophical shrug. Tony went over to Loki, who was completely absorbed in his drawing, and crouched down by his chair.

“Loki, are you listening?” Nod. “Okay. Good. Did your father have to go to long feasts where he talked to important people about boring things?” Nod. “I’ve got to go to one of those kinds of feasts tonight. I would have told you about it sooner, but I’ve only just been told about it. I think they thought I’d find a way to get out of it if I had warning, which is a pretty accurate assumption, to be completely honest. I don’t like these feasts, but I have to go, because my…liege lord? Is that the sort of language you use in Asgard?” Nod. “Okay, cool. My liege lord has commanded. You don’t have to go, don’t worry. Instead, Aunty Nick’s gonna come over and look after you. Okay?” Loki nodded, looked up at him. Seized by sudden dire premonitions, Tony went on. “I’ll be back as soon as I can, and I’d like you to be good for Aunty Nick when he’s here, and do what he says unless it’s dumb. Can you do that? Jarvis’ll be here if you need he lp with anything. Okay?” Nod. “Right…monkey suits,” he said, and stood up. Loki frowned up at him.

“You’re going to be a monkey?”

“Ah, no, sorry. It’s a metaphor— uh, word for another thing. But…Asgard has animal suits that make you into animals?”

“Of course,” he said, like it was completely obvious that people could turn into animals, then went back to his coloring.

Fury came ten minutes before the event started, which was a shame because Tony had planned on being at least three hours late. He was wearing his usual forbidding black, and he had a large briefcase with him. Loki came over and smiled up at him. For some reason (and it wasn’t as if Tony had been massively enthusiastic about him to the kid) Loki really liked Fury, in his own quiet way.

“Good evening, Loki.”

“Well met, Aunty Nick,” and it was the best day’s work Tony had ever done, getting Loki to call him that. Best. Tony was still in his jeans and T shirt, stalling for all he was worth, while Steve and Thor, already in their suits, sat and played cards. Clint was probably trying to fit his bow inside his jacket, and Natasha was going through her knife hiding routine.

“Tony…” he heard from behind Fury, and completely didn’t try and hide.

“Pepper, I was…gonna get ready, I swear I was, hi, you look lovely, I thought you were in Singapore?”

Pepper kissed him on the cheek, then knelt and kissed Loki too. “I was informed that someone might be needing a date,” she said with a smile that still made his stomach clench and his heart sing. Tony scrubbed the back of his head and smiled helplessly.

“I’ll go and…clothes.”

“Good plan, Cinderella,” Fury said, and raised his eyebrow when Tony glared.

Once he’d dressed, he pretty much had to be carried out of the penthouse, still protesting, but that was mainly to make Loki laugh.

The evening wasn’t too terrible. It was a charity event, dinner and a dance. He talked nicely to everyone, got a few digs in about Justin Hammer’s birthday cake with a key escape attempt, ran interference with Thor so he didn’t try and defend his brother’s honor physically.

There were no fights, no strippers and he left with the woman he came with. At one point, he would have counted it as a complete failure, but he got to see Steve and Natasha dancing (he had no idea she’d been teaching him) and Thor spinning old ladies around on the dance floor, beaming like there was nothing he’d rather be doing. He also got to see Clint picking one of the chandeliers as his perch when he got bored of the party, but thankfully for the press coverage, no one but the other Avengers spotted that part.

When they got back at half past midnight (Tony had made Happy take a detour; there was no way he was gonna get there before midnight. Fuck pumpkins.) it was to an eerily quiet tower. They tiptoed out of the elevator onto the penthouse floor, and then just stood, surveying the scene.

The lights were on, still. On the floor of the living area was a map of the world with different colored Smarties on it in a seemingly random pattern (it took Tony a bit of time to realise that the Smarties were on Viking trading/raiding routes) of lines. There was a chess set on the coffee table but all the chess pieces were rainbow-colored, there was a printout of the words to Superstition next to a bright pink banjo and in the middle of it all, flat out asleep, were Fury and Loki lying side by side.

Apparently, Fury had hacked all the camera feeds, because there was no footage of the evening. Tony took twenty eight phone pictures of the end result, anyway, because it always helped to have leverage.

When Tony asked Loki if he’d had a nice evening, he smiled. “It was pleasant,” he said, and that was all he was giving away. 

SHIELD was still trying to track down the giant snake’s origins. There were other odd occurrences with similar energy readings, sightings of giants made of fire or ice, unconfirmed reports of something SHIELD’s historian referred to as a ‘Wild Hunt’, which made Thor mad as a box of crickets, because that was apparently his father’s old trick. Riding out with ghostly horsemen and hunting anyone who mocked the howling of the dogs struck Tony as a shitty trick, but still.

Someone had a grudge against Thor or Loki (or both), and they were getting bolder and fancier. Just how much bolder was brought pretty forcefully home when Tony and Loki, both stir crazy, went on a little adventure out of the tower that turned into more of an adventure than he’d have liked.

They had finished looking in a second hand bookstore when they heard screams in the distance. Loki clung stubbornly to Tony’s hand as if he would disappear at any moment and they ran out into the street. It was snowing, where half an hour ago the skies had been a cloudless blue, and there, in the middle of the road, surging forwards, snarling and howling, was a wolf pack.

Tony stayed still, one hand on Loki’s shoulder. It was weird; the boy wasn’t tense at all. One of the wolves from the pack loped over to them, circled them, getting closer until it was too close, and Tony was on the point of using his wrist repulsor cuffs when it stopped moving and fixed Loki with an unwavering, assessing stare. It looked unnervingly intelligent.

Loki stared back, looking more like he was a prince of Asgard than a three year old, which, hey, he kind of was. He said something to the wolf, something overlaid with harmonics and the sound of distant howls, and the wolf cocked its head to one side, tongue lolling out of its mouth like it was laughing. Loki said something else, now, fists clenched, but the wolf just gave a soft growl then turned and loped off.

“He will not listen to me. Wolves should listen to me! This one felt odd. It wasn’t…wolf enough,” he finished softly. “Tony, there are people around.”

“I know, Loki. And I don’t like the look of the sky at the moment.”

Crows, about three times the size they should be, circled above, and flakes of snow started to flutter down, wolves running along the sidewalk, through the traffic, too many to count and all in one direction, one purpose. Loki had his hand in a tight grip as Tony sent an S.O.S. with Starkphone footage and activated his cuffs and earpiece. He kept turning in a circle, kept Loki shielded as he assessed the situation.

“We have wolves and crows of unknown origin, larger than usual, possibly intelligent. I need civilian evacuation protocols in place: I want them out of their vehicles, off the sidewalks, possible full basement level lockdown. I don’t know what capabilities they have yet, but am initiating evacuation. Do you have a visual?”

“Visual on screen. ETA of suit is one minute. The police have been alerted. The team is assembling and will be with you in five minutes. Distract the birds as much as possible; give the ground teams a chance to work without aerial attacks. Comms will remain active.”

“Roger that. Phil, Loki’s with me,” he said, still circling. Phil paused for a long moment.

“Damn.”

He could just feel when the suit was coming, now, spread his arms and welcomed it, then raised his helmet and knelt down.

“Okay, Loki, look at me. I want you to do a bit of magic, now. I want you to concentrate on feeling warm and safe, like when you’re in the blanket fort, and you’ve got your milk, and Uncle Cap is there and we’re all close by, and I want you to take that safe feeling, and wrap it around yourself. Okay, kid?”

Loki nodded, eyes huge. The wolf was circling now, and he could hear howls, broken glass, sirens and he’d sounded the alarms but he needed to get in the air.

“Then when you’ve done that, you can have a piggy back on my suit. I’ve built you a sling. Look at me, okay? You’re fine,” he said. He could feel something gathering, could feel Loki frowning, and before his eyes, he started to change, his skin started getting raised marks and turning blue, and there was a chill in the air, and he looked so very, very frightened—

“Tony?”

“Hey, Loki. Cool skin, kid. Have you got the shield up? You’re doing so well, now I need you to put your legs around my waist, and the suit’ll do the rest of the work for you.”

There were some cops herding people into nearby shops, roadblocks being made as more and more wolves gathered, as the crows started making aerial strikes, diving down, talons outstretched. Tony climbed sharply, sent a few lure shots out then spiralled up. Loki’s vital signs were on the corner of the screen, and he had visuals of his face, too, eyes closed, tears frozen.

“It’ll be fine, Loki. Now, I’m going to do a bit of fancy flying, the sort that makes Uncle Cap roll his eyes.” He banked, sharply, sent a few more stingers at the birds, getting more of them interested in him, then climbed, noting with some fear how they were in a formation, climbed until Jarvis started bitching at him, then did a sharp dive down, shooting repulsor beams backwards, setting up explosions that the birds were too slow to avoid. “Nice shooting, Stark. Is Loki okay?”

“You can ask him yourself, Cap, he’s got a commlink.”

“Loki, how’re you doing, soldier?”

“I am…well, thank you, Uncle Cap. But I want to go home very badly.”

“You’ll be home, soon, kid. We’ve got all the people safe indoors, and the wolves are contained. I think Hawk’s taking out the remaining crows, so you can take Loki home now, Tony.”

God, he loved Rogers. “Thanks, Cap. I owe you,” he said, and headed home. He kept talking as he flew, trying to calm Loki down, trying to figure out what to tell him.

He desperately wanted to comfort Loki, once he was out of the suit, but the chill emanating from him meant he couldn’t. He knelt down instead, meeting Loki’s eyes. “You were very brave, there, and I really want to give you a high five, but I can’t. Do you think you can change back into warm Loki? You had cold Loki there to do magic for you, and that’s awesome, but I think I need a hug.”

Even though he was shaking, even though his eyes were so dreadfully confused, Loki still managed to concentrate, skin turning to pink again, and as soon as he had, it was like a dam had burst and he let out a howl and just flung himself at Tony and wept like nothing was ever going to be okay again, and all Tony could do was hold him close and talk to him, tell him how brave he was. He’d cried ice when he was in his Jotun form, and the ice was melting and mingling with his tears.

 

“Loki, I’m going to keep saying this until you believe me. Nothing’s wrong with you; you’re still Loki.”

“But I’m not a—a person,” he sobbed into Tony’s chest, and Tony sat back on his heels, made Loki look at him.

 “You’re a person, Loki. Jotuns are people. And you get to be from two places, isn’t that cool? You can be from Jotunheim and Asgard, which is pretty cool if you ask me. Your father loved you so much when he saw you when you were just a little baby that he had to bring you home to be part of his family. Your big brother knows you’re partly Jotun, and does that stop him from loving you? No. Ssh, ssh, it’s fine. Now, I don’t know about you, but I need a glass of milk. I also need a nap, so how about we make a blanket fort?”

Loki nodded, hiccoughing a little. “We’ll wash your face, first. Always makes me feel better, having a clean face. I keep missing bits around my mouth, though, see?” he said, pointing to his moustache, which got him one of his favorite ‘stupid Midgardian’ faces. “No, it’s a real problem, kid. Have you no heart? Honestly. No cookies for you.”  

Loki looked thoughtful, for a few seconds, then put on the most pleading expression Tony had ever seen. It was amazing, like full on big eyes and quivering lower lip. “That’s a neat trick, kid. You get cookies for your implementation of sneak protocol. Your Aunty Tasha teach you that?”

They sorted out milk and cookies, from the secret stash Clint possibly didn’t know about, arranged them neatly on the plate then went to the blanket chest. The blanket chest was something Steve had suggested, because he’d spent like a week wandering about thrift stores, buying brightly colored, soft blankets which everyone somehow ended up using when they watched films together, or just when it was a rainy day and they had nothing else to do but look out of the windows and drink coffee.

Between that and the many couches and chairs in the room, they had the makings of the best blanket fort in the world. Tony was basically Loki’s trained monkey at this point, following Loki’s directions as he pointed imperiously. It usually took them a few tries to get the fort to his satisfaction, but the light inside it was soft and it was warm, and Tony leaned back against the side of the couch, glass of milk in hand, and added a few more notes to his file on Amora.

Clearly, wolves were her thing. They were also kind of Loki’s thing, too, or at least, adult Loki. Wolves and snakes and crows and spiders, all the things other people didn’t like. He looked over to Loki, who was carefully drawing, lying flat on his stomach, occasionally taking a cookie from the plate then forgetting to eat it and just holding it up in his hand.

The rest of the team came back after a shorter time than Tony had expected. Loki sat up and looked a little worried.

“Your brother knows, Loki,” Tony said with a smile, slipping his tablet back into his pocket. “Shall we ask him to enter our mighty fort?” he asked a little louder, for Thor’s benefit.

“Brother, we have matters of….big things to talk of,” Loki called out. “And the Lady Pepper is here,” he said to Tony, and made a little shooing motion.

“Thrown out of my own fort,” he muttered, then crawled out, tripped over his legs and ended up just sprawled on the floor, looking up a line of grinning faces. “Pepper! Pepper, Loki threw me out. Not fair.”

“Oh, poor baby,” she said, her voice honey-sweet. He accepted Steve’s hand up, gave Pepper a quick kiss and leaned into her, twining their fingers together.

“I missed you. Are you here for a stay? Please?”

“I’ve got a few days. Some things I need you to sign, but I can do some catching up on reading. We need to discuss your scholarship idea, too.”

“Hey, no, I just say things and then they happen, don’t they? I mean, I thought they did—”

“When has that ever worked? Ever?”

“Pep, it’s—oh, okay. Fine, you’ve got the boss look on, which is kind of hot, I’ll dress up in the pencil skirt if you wear the tie—mmph!”

He kept trying to speak through Clint’s hand, and when that failed, tried to twist him off and ended up on the floor with a knee in his back. When he’d stopped struggling and was just laughing helplessly, Clint fixed him with one of his unnerving looks.

“Not in front of the kids, Stark,” he said, then let him get up. By that point, Pepper had her papers next to her on the couch, had kicked her shoes off and was discussing something with Phil in a low voice.

“Fine, fine. So…giant magical wolves. Is this gonna be a thing, now?”

Steve shook his head. “You forgot the crows, Tony. There were weaponized crows, too.”

“Oh my,” Bruce murmured, and smiled slightly. “Anyone else get an Amora type vibe from this? And is anyone else wondering if it was aimed at you and Loki somehow?”

Tony put his hands in his pockets, bounced once or twice on the balls of his feet. “I’m getting a better picture of her every time she pulls something like this. Makes me wonder if she has previous business with Loki, but I sort of don’t want to go to the bad breakup place, because no. So what happened with our little magic zoo, then?”

“Those crows were mean,” Clint said, almost pouting. “Organised and angry by the time you’d gone all Johnny bang bang on their feathery asses, but I’m up to date with my shots, so what’s a scalping between friends?”

“The wolves were…odd. We fought them off, but PETA’s gonna have a field day with this one. It’s hard to tell them that they were more sapient than they should’ve been when there are pictures of Thor smiting them into nearby buildings. But we dealt with them, kept them contained. I just...”

“We have no way of knowing how to fight things like this; magic, illusions and mind tricks aren’t something we’ve been properly trained for,” Nat said, then looked over at the blanket fort, with a slight smile. “From what you’ve said, Loki’s got an instinctive grasp for this kind of thing. He’s the best one to deal with these attacks.”

“Whatever side he’d be on,” Tony made himself say, because he was a realist, he tried to be, anyway, and he knew he’d end up fighting Loki again at some point. He was just…not looking forward to it. Nat’s eyes were clear and steady, and Steve’s hand was warm on his shoulder. “I’m just…gonna go be in the blanket fort.” The light looked better in there.

Thor was helping Loki color in his picture when Tony crawled in. “Greetings, Man of Iron!” he almost whispered. Tony saluted him, then sat, with his knees up to his chest, watching the two brothers as they worked.

 _I don’t want this to end._ Admitting it, even in his heart of hearts, hurt. He leaned back and followed the play of light in the brightly colored wool, and listened to the murmurs of people, all around him, people who had found a way into his home and heart.

The Imperial March started playing, alerting the team to Fury’s imminent arrival. Thor put a hand on Loki’s head, and smiled as he butted up into it.

“Stay here, brother. And you, Tony. I shall guard this fortress,” he declaimed. There was really no other word for it. Tony nodded, made a few alterations to the schematics of the Loki carrier as he waited for Fury’s inevitable questions.

It was ten minutes before Thor’s stalling finally ground to a halt, but Tony was pretty sure he heard Thor offer to “perform a Midgardian dance I find passing fair,” which. What.

Fury poked his head into the entrance of the blanket fort. “I don’t think I have ever had to debrief a toddler before— Stark, zip it— but I would be grateful if you could tell me what happened.”

Loki nodded. “Yes, Aunty Nicholas,” he said, with a little welcoming gesture. Tony just sat back, grinning a little as Fury crawled in, sat on one of the giant cushions and accepted the cookie he was offered.

“Do you know what a debriefing is?” Fury asked.

“Stupid waste of time but not as bad as filling in forms,” Loki said, and seriously, mind of a parrot.

“Yes, well, while I’m sure you could color me in a wolf on the H2 120B-28 form, it wouldn’t tell me much about what happened. Debriefings are what we have to talk about what just happened. Maybe it’s a new thing, like today, and we want to improve how we dealt with it, or it’s something that keeps happening and we want to know why it does and what we can do to stop it. It’s so we have records of things, so we don’t need to keep it all in our memories.”

“Not stupid?” Loki asked, looking at Tony.

“…Maybe a bit not stupid sometimes,” he muttered into his chest.

“Right. Now we’ve cleared that up, I’d like to hear what happened, starting from when you saw the wolves.”

Loki closed his eyes, a little frown on his face. “I smelt snow. Then there were wolves, but they didn’t do as I said. They understood Allspeak, but they did not respect it. I told them to leave, and they laughed at me. They said they wanted fun first. They did not feel Asgardian. Then there was snow, and birds, and I turned blue and we flew.”

“I’ve seen the footage. Nice papoose, Stark. How did the wolves feel? Did they feel alive, or like magic, or dead?”

Loki’s eyes were distant, still a little sad. “They felt dead, but full of magic. Aunty Nick, did you make them stop hurting people?”

Fury blinked, then his lips curved up into a warm smile. “We resolved our differences with them. Stark, do you want to do this the easy way or the hard way?”

Tony asked Loki to draw him a robot design that they could make together, then he picked the whole incident apart with Fury, talking about the flight formations of the crows, wolves without fear of fire or regard for broken glass. He talked briefly about Loki’s transformation, how he had wanted a magical barrier as well as the one that he had built.

He hadn’t missed Fury’s look as Loki talked about turning blue, and he knew damn well he was aware of the Jotun situation. He’d uploaded his file on Amora onto Fury’s private server, too, only the hard evidence, not the suspicions that he kept to himself. He needed to talk to Thor about her, but he didn’t like going in without sufficient data.

“Okay, I’ll let you know if we have further questions. How’s the robot going?”

Loki handed him the piece of paper. “That’s good. It…it draws other robots?” Nod.

“You ever want a job at SHIELD, let me know,” Fury said, and laughed quietly as he exited the fort.

Tony dragged out making the robot-drawing robot, making sure Loki was completely involved in it, in the soldering and the programming, in the best way to make the claw so it could grip crayons and pencils, and, once it had learnt enough, a paintbrush.

He was still troubled, still kept looking at his hands, at his reflection in any shiny surface he found. He stopped eating ice cream, too, until Natasha brought out the tub of chocolate flavor, his favorite, and put a spoon near his place, then looked the other way with her bowl until he tugged on her sleeve and asked if he could have some.

Thor resumed magic lessons with him, making it a game. Tony watched, worried about Loki, about what would happen if he changed again. Thor noticed, and found him once he’d put Loki to bed one night. They shot the breeze for a little bit, then Thor sat forward in his seat, earnest.

“You worry about my brother, Man of Iron. Were he a few years older, I would too. The Jotun race is something Loki would have heard of in passing. They will not have been talked about with him in the room, but he will know that they are of a country that has been in combat with Asgard for many years. Now, it is more that he is cold and blue, and his skin is not his own, rather than any hate for what he is. Worry not.”

“Thanks. I…yeah. So your brother found out about this? I mean, him as an adult? He wasn’t, uh, sat down when he was a teenager and told about the birds and the bees with a little stinger at the end? ‘Now we’ve got that out of the way, let’s have another awkward conversation. You’re adopted and by the way you turn into a popsicle’?”

Thor paused for a long time, shifted in his seat. “Aye. He found out by accident. It sat sorely with him.”

“And with you?”

“Man of Iron, he is my brother. Not in blood, perhaps, but he is my brother. I would not forsake him again.”

At some point, Tony intended to get Thor completely hammered (Ha. Still funny.) and ask about the whole brother thing. He just…didn’t have any context for it, for fraternal bonds that were stronger than blood and betrayal. What he loved, he had chosen to love.

“Okay, that’s…yeah.”

“I have come to know the Jotun a little better since my first time on earth. Father, as a measure of goodwill, has been aiding in the rebuilding of the frozen cities. I was…encouraged to make myself of use to them. It was just, given that I was responsible for some of the destruction.”

“Community service?”

Thor grinned, laughed a little. “Yes. Though I did not wear such clothes as the Midgardian realm’s miscreants don.”

A week later, word came that Odin had woken up. Tony hid his initial reaction, despair, and started feverishly compiling the two files he’d been putting off. Loki was happy as a clam that he would see his parents again, but, as he confided to Tony in a whisper, not happy to leave the Tower. Happy-not-happy meant ice cream was involved. Loki knew that the aim of going to New Mexico would be turning back into an adult in the abstract, but it was something he just wasn’t capable of understanding completely. He just knew that something was ending, and something else was starting up again.

The rest of the team had come up with contingency strategies in case Loki came back megalomaniacal and Tony had been in denial but willing to humor them. When the time came to go to New Mexico for the final stages of the temporary bridge, Fury told them in no uncertain terms that he was coming along too, which meant double the one-eye quips Tony was heroically not vocalising.

Loki asked if Aunty Maria could come, too, so Odin was gonna get the full SHIELD delegation.

Loki sensed that Tony wasn’t particularly okay with the situation, and stuck close on the flight, curling up on his and Pepper’s laps as they sat quietly. None of the team was, really, but it was possible, even likely, that, given the fact Loki was pretty much immortal, he would grow at an Asgardian pace not a Midgardian one, so that by the time he was the equivalent of nineteen, everyone (Tony) would be dead.

Additionally, according to Bruce, the magic was taking its toll on him. Self control wasn’t really something a child should have at that age, so physically and mentally it was burning through him. Sometimes, Tony wanted to go back five years. He’d had better defences against people then.

Jane Foster was brilliant, over-caffeinated and very, very nervous about meeting the in-laws. It led to some exceptionally fast talking, which only Bruce and Tony could really follow, but Thor looked at her like she hung the moon even strung out and incoherent.

They were using Mjolnir as a power source, connected to a beautifully complex, endearingly wonky looking machine. Tony carried Loki a safe distance away and watched as lightning arced then spiralled and clouds gathered directly above them, gray mixed with light and lightning and flashes of rainbow.

They watched until it was too bright to look at, Loki burying his head in the side of Tony’s neck, the rest of them closing their eyes as he felt his arc reactor sing in response. It was beautiful and terrifying, something he would take a hundred years to truly understand.

When the noise died down, there were two people standing in the middle of a complex knotwork sand pattern. Loki wriggled out of Tony’s arms, caught his hand and ran to them, laughing, Tony in tow.

“Father, Mother, this is my Tony and these are my friends,” he said proudly.

“Well met, Loki’s Tony and Loki’s friends, we owe you all a great debt,” Odin said, voice warm and rumbling. He looked at them all in turn, eye piercing. He was both respectful of them and every inch a king. It was a balancing act that Tony found oddly fascinating. “I am happy to see you safe and well, my son,” he said gruffly, swinging Loki up into his arms. Tony swallowed hard, tried to take a step back but was pulled into an embrace by Loki’s mother.

“Thank you, Man of Iron,” she whispered, and if his eyes were a little wet when she let go, who was to know, then Thor swept them both up into a massive bear hug. Tony managed to scramble up so he could at least breathe and caught a glimpse of Odin and Loki with identical resigned expressions, which cracked him up laughing, making Thor laugh even more. They stayed in New Mexico the whole day, sitting together under a canopy that kept off the worst of the sun. It was kind of like a cross between a playdate and a diplomatic visit. Tony was willing to bet Fury’s other eye that he hadn’t told the Council about the Asgardian VIPs, and he could see why. A conference among warriors rather than deskbound statesmen was more likely to be successful, especially when said deskbound statesmen had the ability to _nuke Manhattan_ without risking themselves at all. Not that it was really a full conference, not when Fury was busy telling Loki a story using Wolf and Dragon as the main characters (he was doing all the voices) as the rest of them sat, oddly mesmerised. It pretty much turned into storytime from that point in. From the stories Odin, Thor and Frigga told, Asgardian bedtimes were _bizarre_ , which wasn’t really that much of a surprise, thinking about it. It was a good last day.

There was a feast that evening, out under the stars. Odin had waved his hand and a giant table had appeared. He asked Jane to sit next to him, which made her a little wide eyed terrified for a second, but then she stood up a little straighter and said it would be an honor, because Jane Foster didn’t stay scared for long and the chance to get the bridge mended and see Asgard for herself wasn’t one she would willingly pass up. She was a scientist above all else

Loki sat between his mother and Tony, keeping up a fairly steady stream of chatter, making Tony show her the Starkphone and Loki’s drawing program and calling him a Midgardian Enchanter of Science, which he was getting embroidered on something when he got back. He introduced Pepper to his mother with a shy smile, and told her about Dummy, and Uncle Jarvis, the man who lived in the walls who was mean to Tony sometimes. He told her about the suit, and the giant snake, and the wolves, and when he said he’d turned blue, she kissed him on the forehead and called him her darling son. Tony kept an eye on the rest of them. Fury had drawn Odin into a quiet debate across the table which made both Thor and Jane look a little concerned. They were probably figuring out who got which bits of earth when they became evil overlords. “Should we be worried?” Tony asked Natasha, jerking his head to indicate the discussion at the head of the table. She looked at them quickly.

“Probably,” she said, voice going into the slight monotone that Tony _thought_ meant she was fucking with him. He still wasn’t sure with her. He would have made a quip about depth perception but thought it might be a bit rude with his wife close by.

“Midgard has begun to make an impression on some powerful worlds,” Frigga said, her eyes far too knowing for Tony’s comfort. “Your Director Fury, he has sent out an interesting challenge. You might need our…”

“Support?” Natasha asked, not giving much away. Tony was aware of a whole different conversation going on under the surface, something that was beyond him. Loki tugged at his sleeve and he turned away from their bizarre mind meld thing.

“Hey kiddo.”

“’Lo. I had…when I’m grown, will I still see you?”

Tony almost laughed. However this went, they’d be seeing each other. One day, Loki might even be the one to finish him off if the coffee, heroics, experiments and alcohol didn’t. He didn’t laugh, though, he ruffled Loki’s hair, which made him bat Tony’s hand away, and he took a chance that might come back to bite him in the ass. “Yes. I promise. My workshop will always be open to you,” he said, and it felt a little like an oath. Loki nodded and smiled.

“Good.”

“Good?”

“Best,” Loki said firmly. When he looked up, Natasha was watching them with a soft smile that nearly broke his self-control. He looked back at his plate and blinked.

It was a full moon, the sky bright above them when Odin stood and said, “It is time,” his voice echoing even in the open air. “Loki, my son, it is time I undid this enchantment. Come here.”

Loki got off his chair, leaned into Tony’s leg for a second then kissed his cheek. He went round everyone on the table and kissed them and was kissed in return, like he was just about to go to bed. He then walked over to his father, who knelt down, embraced him and kissed him formally, once on each cheek, once on his forehead. Then, he put his hand on the top of Loki’s head and closed his eyes. Gold light mingled with green and black strands that swirled out of Loki, all tangled together with flashes of red. As they watched, the strands separated out until the light that came from Loki was pure green, the black coalescing into a ball of nothingness that grew and spun until, with a casual gesture, Odin pressed it between his hands. Gold surrounded the pair, becoming brighter and brighter then fading suddenly leaving them blinking in the dark of the moonlight. There, kneeling facing each other, were Odin and Loki. Loki was naked, surrounded by the tatters of his too-smal l clothes.

“Well, that was interesting,” Loki murmured, almost to himself, then stood up, seemingly totally at ease with his nudity. “Father. Mother. Stark,” he said, acknowledging each of them in turn with a nod. He looked soft, confused. No smirks, no fronting.  Odin took off his cloak and settled it around his shoulders, then pressed their foreheads together.

Tony turned and went to the trunk of the jeep to get out his briefcase. He didn’t meet anyone’s eyes. Feeling incredibly self-conscious, he handed Loki the briefcase, meeting his eyes by accident in the full knowledge that Loki could read a good deal more in them than he was comfortable with. In it were two folders. One folder contained information on Amora the Enchantress- her fighting style, known hideouts, suspected alliances, energy outputs, suspected weaknesses, known enemies, the lot.

The other folder…the other folder had copies of every drawing Loki had made, every picture Jarvis had taken of him and them together, of him with the other avengers, with his brother, with Fury, pictures of the babysitting incident of which Fury will not speak. Just…everything. He’d been keeping records pretty much from the start, and still didn’t know completely why.

Loki looked at him, his expression still open and unguarded, so open it felt cruel to look at him, then, suddenly he was closed off again, distantly amused.

“Well, no rest for the wicked,” he said, and with a lazy gesture, disappeared, leaving the cloak behind him.

“I need a drink.”

Odin was still looking at him. Tony recognised something of himself in him, the grit and cunning, the thin line between the greater good and what is actually right, the equivocation, lies and smokescreens and underneath it all the knowledge of one’s own capacity for causing death, destruction, for setting the world alight and watching it burn, the awareness of the precise circumstances it would take. He met his eye.

“We thank you for the care you have shown my son, Man of Iron. It will not be forgotten. Not by us, and, I think, not by him.”

Tony nodded, swallowed. He kind of sleepwalked through the leave-takings, through Bruce and Jane’s jerry rigging of the Einstein-Rosen and the journey back to the jet, leaving Thor with Jane to help her pack up and move to New York. No one tried to talk to him, but Pepper and Natasha sat either side of him in the quinjet, leaning into him without a word. He watched the world go by and just…was.

He and Pepper, once they were in the tower, lay on his bed together and watched old musicals, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, swooping violins and heroines with the best lines, champagne and cocktails, a cigarette in every scene and heroes who could say ‘We’ll always have Paris’ and mean it. They fell asleep holding each other tight.

“I miss him,” he whispered into the room when he was sure Pepper was asleep.

The next day, he put all of Loki’s things in his corner of the workroom. He left some things up, like the mobiles in the penthouse, but the beds he was thinking of giving to one of the Maria Stark Foundation orphanages. Aside from putting all of his belongings into one place, Tony didn’t really make any effort to give them away, and they were there as a reminder as he threw himself into work to a degree he knew worried Steve.

Thor came and sat in the workroom sometimes, looked at the wall of drawings. Clint got Tony completely drunk one night and they ended up doing karaoke at a drag bar at four in the morning, then they took the suit and went and sat in his doughnut. His sad, sad lonely doughnut. It was pretty comforting; Clint agreed with him.

They stayed there until midday, when the whole team turned up and just…looked at them. The worst thing was, they didn’t even tell him off, Steve didn’t do his ‘trying not to judge’ face, Phil didn’t threaten to taser him _once_ , and Natasha just murmured something comforting in Russian and fed him doughnuts and coffee while he lay in the booth with his head on her lap.

Then, one day, all of the things in the corner of the workroom, with the exception of all his drawings, disappeared. He scanned the security footage and energy readings looking for something, anything that would explain their disappearance until alerts sounded in the workroom and Jarvis called up a news report of a parking lot where all the cars had been turned into frozen fish and there was a giant oak tree standing in the middle, fully grown overnight, so he put on his cuffs (just in case) and went back to work.

Pepper came in in the afternoon, fed him a sandwich and gave him some forms to sign. He didn’t tell her about the parking lot, and wasn’t quite sure why. They worked together quietly until the evening then Pepper dragged him up into the penthouse for some ‘normal people time’, but he didn’t think the people in the penthouse were normal, given that they’ve collectively done billions of dollars of property damage and saved the world as a bonus. He looked up at the mobiles and smiled at the way they caught the light, sat down for a tower meal and did his best to pay attention, even though he felt like something was gonna happen any moment and he didn’t know if it would be good or bad, and the rest of them were treading on eggshells around him and Thor, and missing him too, all of them.

He went to bed with Pepper, waited until she was asleep, then padded down to the workroom. He was making one of the hoverboard prototypes out of wood, for the lightness and flex and because Steve was occasionally a complete traditionalist, which meant he was using his grandfather’s toolbox, with its saws and planes, sheets and sheets of sandpaper, clamps and glue that smelt indescribable even dried up in glass jars. It was three AM when he heard the faint whisper and turned around.

Loki stood there in the corner, his corner, wearing full battle gear looking mildly surprised.

“I must say I rather expected to have more trouble than this. Getting lax there, Stark?”

Tony didn’t really listen to him, just rushed over with the medical kit, “God, Loki, sit down before you fall down—how much of this blood is yours? When was the last time you slept?” pushing him down in a chair, checking him over for injuries.

Loki sat down obediently and turned his face as directed. Tony was in the middle of cleaning a graze on Loki’s cheek when they both realised that he was no longer actually a toddler. Tony paused and they sat, frozen, for a long, uncomfortable stretch of time. The Band-Aid he had in his hand had _Winnie the fucking Pooh_ on it. He couldn’t stop staring at it. Loki clicked his fingers and the bottle of whisky from all those months ago came floating through the workshop.

“Withdrawal from the Tesseract was…interesting. My thoughts and desires had become so intertwined with it that I knew not what I truly thought or wanted. Now, I seem to want a pear, a glass of milk, a bath and a nap. It will not do, Man of Iron.” He swigged the whisky with a shudder.

“You remember it all?”

“Aye.”

Tony had so many questions. He went back to cleaning Loki’s wounds as he drank from the bottle, a bottle that seemed to contain the same level of liquid however much he drank. Once Tony was satisfied he wasn’t going to keel over, having made Loki promise he wasn’t hiding any injuries, he put the first aid kit back and busied himself with the hoverboard, the familiar movements of plane on wood comforting.

He was better with metal, with heat and change, but this gradual shaping calmed him; the need to go slow, to go with the inclination of the wood was a change of pace. He got lost in the work, was distantly aware of a tingling feeling at the back of his neck but ignored it, kept on planing, sanding and finishing, then cleaned and put away his tools.

When he was done, he looked over at Loki’s corner. There, in pretty much the same place as where his cot used to be, Loki had created an adult sized futon, with sheets of the same shade of blue as his old bed. Loki lay sprawled on top of the covers, his eyes half shut.

“So how long’s she going to be a tree?”

“You noticed that, Stark?”

Tony went to the workshop refrigerator, got the bottle of milk out and poured out two glasses. “I’m not dumb, Loki. Sorry I don’t have any pears down here, but I figure you’re set up for a nap,” he said lightly, not sure how far this thing would go. Loki looked at the milk a little balefully but accepted it, propping himself up on one elbow to sip it.

“She…she isn’t in the tree any more. Those who mess around with magic in Asgard generally have a few failsafes, soul vessels, crystals, that sort of thing. Dying a true death is not really possible. She is banished from this realm and the realm of Asgard, though. Stark, that blue light in your chest. You told me it was your heart. Is that so?”

“In essence. Well, it keeps my heart beating, but I didn’t want to go into electromagnets at that time of night.”

“I liked it. The light…you were honest with me. Even when you didn’t have to be. It was…of value. I just wish…” he trailed off, eyes slipping shut for a moment. “I wish to see the world’s largest ball of twine, Tony Stark. Would you like to accompany me?”

He would. They did.

 

 

THE END


End file.
